


Walking to Jerusalem

by Laguera25



Category: Dredd (2012), Priest (2011)
Genre: F/M, Lactation Kink, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Threesome - F/M/M, Vampire Sex, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2019-06-14 03:35:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 50,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15379791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laguera25/pseuds/Laguera25
Summary: Bring law unto the lawless, the Church Fathers told him, and turned him out into the vast wasteland beyond the city with nothing but his helmet and his Lawgiver.  But there is no law here, and never will be.  It's too hard, too feral for even him to conquer.  As he prepares to die on the desert sand, he opens his sun-blasted eyes one last time.And gazes into his own eyes.





	1. In the Godless Lands, I Found the Devil

**Author's Note:**

> I started this as a lark, to see if I could make these two dystopian worlds work together. It's not finished, and may never be, but you're welcome to enjoy it all the same.

Hardpan. Miles and miles of hardpan, and he has no strength left. His booted feet slide on the cracked earth, and his palms are raw from scrabbling in the grit to push himself upright again. His tongue is swollen inside his mouth, dry as the shale on which he totters, and his stomach is so much shriveled sinew. His entire body cramps at the thought of water, and he lows like an animal as his feet scrape and shuffle, driven forward by mindless will.

His mind is failing him, fogged by hunger and ravening thirst, but it's still astute enough to know he's dying. He can't remember when he had his last meal, though his teeth remember the crunch of minute bones, and his tongue recalls the knobbled, leathery chewiness of skin and the coppery sluice of blood down his eager, spasming throat. Water is but a tormenting dream now, and when last he'd pulled himself from the remains of his regulation leathers, his urine stream had been a pitiful, brown dribble. Not even enough for a mouthful. 

He squints behind his visor. His eyes are dry behind its protection; he supposes his body is leaching every available drop of moisture from his tissues in a futile bid to stave off the inevitable.

_Won't be long now,_ he thinks distantly as he takes another step and sways on his feet. _Hours, maybe._ This will likely be his last sunset, and he wishes he could find it within himself to care, but all he feels is relief. Very soon now, he will simply drop where he stands, and the sand that slithers into every crevice and slips into his panting mouth to scour his cracked tongue and abrade his teeth will no longer matter.

A sin, the Church would call it, a repudiation of God's grace to embrace the end of the life and duty with which he has been blessed and charged, but he finds he does not care about that, either. The Church has dismissed him from its service, turned him out into the wastes to administer the law unto the lawless until his days are ended according to God's will. A reward for faithful service, they had called it as they'd sat upon their gilded thrones and gazed upon him with cold hauteur, fleshless, old fingers curled around the armrests, but he'd seen the truth of it in their flinty, reptilian gazes. This was no reward for a duty well and faithfully executed, but the brutal economy of a crumbling Church rocked by the scandals of corrupt Judges in the pockets of crime syndicates and a resurgence of the vampire menace from beyond the walls.

He was forty years old, ancient for a Judge, and time and wounds had taken their toll. He was slower to heal and slower on the draw, and after word got out that he had passed Anderson after overlooking two automatic fails during her trial by fire at Peachtrees, they no longer trusted his judgment. Time and sentimentality had softened him, they whispered to one another over the lips of their silvered goblets and between bites of roasted chicken, and a Judge without the necessary ruthlessness was no Judge at all.

And so, they had stripped him of his badge and his Lawmaster and evicted him from his room on the precinct grounds, and in the cold hush of the dawn, they had cast him out of the city with nothing but a Bible and his Lawgiver and a canteen of water on each hip.

"Go with God, my son," Monsignor Chamberlain had intoned, and performed the sign of the cross above his head, and a half-dozen of his former colleagues had lined either side of his path into the void. Whether in tribute or as implicit threat against resistance he could not tell. He had trained most of them himself, taught them how to shoot and to fight and to kill in defense of another. Judge Hershey had trained him once upon a time, but she would not look at him as he passed with his helmet beneath his arm and a Bible held between his hands as though it were the Holy of Holies. Anderson had met his gaze, but her eyes had been dry as her hair blew in the morning breeze. She knew the penalty for such weakness. Here it was in all its clandestine spectacle, and she was determined not to make the same mistake, to give the suspicious Fathers more reason to doubt her fitness for the job and rue the day they had ever indulged Hershey's progressive notion to turn psi mutants to their use. Not a word as he passed. Only the crunch of sand beneath his feet.

Monsignor Orelas had stood at the gates with a final Communion wafer, dry as a pebble on his obediently outthrust tongue. A swallow of bitter wine, and then he stepped beyond the gates and was a child of God no more, but an outcast, doomed to make his penance by a walk across the unending sands and admonished to spread the law until he fell.

_You are the Law and only the Law,_ Monsignor Orelas says inside his head. _You are the righteous arm of the Lord your God, and you will enforce His will from this day forward. You shall know no other purpose, serve no other master. You shall forsake all earthly pleasures and be a willing and faithful tool in His service until he calls you home. Do you accept this charge?_

_Yes._ As if he had ever had the choice.

He drops to a knee, rises again. If he falls, he'll never get back up. It's an effort just to stand, to breathe. His eyelids weigh a thousand pounds, and his lungs strain feebly against his ribs.

_Then why don't you just lie down?_ asks a coolly rational voice inside his head. _Just stop fighting and let the end come?_

Because he does not want it said that they were right, that time had softened him, made him weak. He does not want it said that he went easily or feebly into that long night.

_My boy,_ the voice says, and there's a note of pity in it. _When you die out here, no one will know or care what became of you. Out here, even God closes His eyes._ Soft, throaty laughter, scree tumbling over a precipice. 

He'd tried, at first, to carry out the final mandate impressed upon him by the Church fathers; his devotion to the law had not vanished with the loss of his badge, but the lawbreakers beyond the walls had no reverence for a Church that had cast them out, and deprivation and isolation had made them savage, almost bestial, creatures of hard eyes and sharpened fangs. The Lawgiver had inspired a healthy respect for the first few months, but plentiful ammunition had not been one of the Fathers' few parting gifts, and now the Lawgiver is impotent against his hip, empty and mute and good only for collecting sand in its barrel and safety. He likely should have tossed it aside, a discarded relic from his former life, but it is too much a part of him, and so he supposes that it will lie with his bones as they bleach in the sun and gradually disappear beneath a blanket of sand.

The ammo had given out long before he'd reached the first settlement, a sad, sagging cluster of ramshackle buildings that had sprouted from the hardpan like diseased fungi, but its presence on his hip had kept the townsfolk at a respectful distance when he'd walked into the local tavern and asked for water and a room with a fine grit on his tongue.

_You got coin, mister?_ A friendly drawl, but eyes of flint, and fingers tightened on a dirty rag.

_No. But I am the Law, and I will enforce it in exchange for a bed._

_We have no use for the law 'round here._ Those eyes glinted. _And what's a law worth that can be decided for the price of a bed, anyhow?_

So they had sent him on, dead, indifferent gazes on his back as he pushed on into the dust and smothering heat. And so it had gone in town after town. No room to be had unless there was gold or copper in his hand, and no water to cool his cracking, peeling lips. A few of the women had offered him a bed and a draught of stronger stuff in exchange for a night between their raised skirts, and he had been tempted as hunger had gnawed and twisted his belly and thirst had clawed his swelling tongue, especially after the libido suppressants he'd taken since he was eleven years old had left his system and left him at the mercy of impulses of which he had only read and seen the squalid aftermath, but a man who succumbed to the pitiful cries of the flesh soon became its slave, and so he had turned from the offers and dragged himself beyond their tantalizing grasp.

A few settlements had let him stay for a time, but for every grateful citizen who slept more easily beneath the shadow of the Law, there were the bandits who resented his interference and the vengeful kin of the same, and it wasn't long before they gathered at his door and provoked him to a fight that could only end one way, and the townspeople grew tired of the violence and the blood and the battered bodies in the middle of the street and the sight of him with blood on his hands and spattered over his visor.

_We think it's best if you move on now._ A delegation of men dressed in their threadbare best, hats clutched convulsively in callused hands and eyes bright inside gaunt faces, as though they thought him a slavering beast with blood on its teeth.

_It's not that we ain't grateful-_ A reedy, rabbity voice that shrinks from his searching gaze. _-but since you've been here, it's been nothin' but trouble. More than you stop. We'd rather you just moved along, found a more suitable place._

_And where might that be?_

No answer forthcoming, just uneasy mutters and dropped gazes and a small sacks of provisions thrust into his hands or left upon the small table of his spartan room. _Some water and vittles for your journey. My wife's handpie, the best you'll ever taste._ Hat brims squeezed in fretful, guilty farewell, and the hurried scrape of departing feet as they scurried into the abetting darkness. No dull eyes boring into his back then, but peering through bleary windowpanes to track his progress into the night, his dark misfortunes trailing in his wake like the tail of a kite.

The last town is far behind him now. Three days? Four? He no longer knows. Time has warped, grown elastic and gummy and inconsequential. There is only the dim knowledge that he is dying, that his blood is slowing and turning to sludge in his veins. Soon its flow will cease, choked by a clot that sends him to the sand to fishtail and jerk and choke to death in his own shit, such as it is. Three days or four, it is too far back to save him.

It's in the gloaming when his knees buckle and he crashes to the hardpan. He immediately tucks his hands under himself and pushes himself to his hands and knees, but his limbs tremble and burn with the effort, and when he tries to rise, his head throbs and spins, and he dry heaves helplessly as his vision swims.

_Crawl,_ he commands himself. _Move. If you stop, you'll die._

_You'll die anyway,_ the coolly rational voice inside his head points out.

His arm jerks forward, followed by his knee, and he splays idiotically on the hardpan, which bites into his chin with vampiric glee.

_Up. Up._ His limbs flail spasmodically, and he can only grunt and raise his ass into the air. _This is it. My walk is ended._ It's a perverse relief, and he lets himself go limp and draws a labored, rattling breath.

"Well, now, what do we have here?" asks a silky, faraway voice above him, and his limbs twitch with the instinct to roll him onto his back. There's more will than ability, alas, and he's helped along by a booted toe to the ribs. He yelps at the flare of agony, and his body spins obediently onto its back.

His eyes swim into focus, and when they do, that he is dying is beyond doubt, because he's staring into his own face. He blinks at himself as his bladder looses fruitlessly into his leathers.

_Why are my eyes yellow?_ he wonders. He tries to speak, but his tongue is so much jerky in his mouth, and all that emerges is a glottal grunt. Even that effort is too much for his overtaxed system, and his eyes roll back in his head and his body bows and writhes in the dirt at his doppelganger's feet. 

 

He gazes down at the potential sweetmeat twitching at his feet. Promising, as far as such specimens go. Thin, yes, but not wasted, and when he flares his nostrils to catch his scent, there is no high, sweet stink of infection or incipient fever, no harbinger of a night spent slumped on the toilet and heaving into a sick bowl while a puffy-eyed Liese tries to soothe him and their fussy infant. He flicks the blade of his tongue against the tip of his fang and drops into a crouch for a closer inspection.

"Not much of a talker, are you?" he asks conversationally as his quarry continues to seize. "Well, that's all right. I find that too much familiarity spoils the broth." He brushes sand from the collar of his leather jacket and grimaces at the unwelcome possibility of sand in his teeth. It's good leather, better than most found out here, and he makes a metal note to take it once dinner is over.

He unzips the jacket to reveal a black t-shirt and a broad chest. The heart behind it is struggling, though, an erratic, fluttering timpani, and the blood it fights to pump is thick inside overheated veins, a sweet sludge that makes his mouth water with anticipation.

_This one might be a rare vintage. Priest?_ He glances at his forehead, but finds only a tinted visor. That's not priest-issue, but it inspires a frisson of familiarity, nonetheless. He's seen that helmet before, with its red band and golden eagle and its air of incontrovertible authority, but precisely when and where eludes him, and anyway, in a few moments, it will no longer matter. The helmet and the inedible mortal remains of its wearer will be left to the avid claim of the desert, his belly will be warm and distended with this unexpected manna from the dark gods of the desert, and he will be on his way home to his family with a gift of good leather in hand.

The thought of Liese's pleasure at such a gift unlooked-for makes him smile, and he hums as he bends to sniff his prey's neck. Honeyed perfume, and he shudders with need. "So sweet." His tongue darts out to taste the exposed flesh, salt and sweat and exhaustion. He stiffens inside his jeans at the heady prospect of such a feast.

"My wife sends her regards, friend, because I think she's in for a long night."

A feeble croak and a copulatory surge of hip is the only response, and his own hips jerk in sympathy.

_Oh, friend, I think this may be better than a fuck. Far, far better._

He reaches up to sweep the helmet from the man's head. He wants to look him in the eye as he dies, to savor the terror and the confusion and the wide-eyed desperation for a salvation that never comes. He wants to watch the light fade from his eyes with every greedy suck.

The helmet slides off to reveal the face beneath, and he's so startled that he recoils. "What the-?" He sits back on his knees, and his chest heaves.

_What the hell is this? This can't be._ He reaches out to touch the haggard, sunburned face, prod it in attempt to discover the secret of its deceit. Maybe it's a mask, a disguise cooked up by the cowardly, vengeful Church Fathers to ensnare him. Maybe it's a dummy filled with poison that will leave him vomiting his intestines onto the desert sand over and over again in a wet, clotted splatter, or a sedative that will leave him helpless against their operatives as they slink from the shadows to torture and despoil him before they cut off his head and drive a stake through his heart. The flesh beneath his hand is warm and dry and very much alive. A man, then. Maybe he volunteered to poison himself in the service of his God.

_Or the volunteered for him. It wouldn't be the first time._ An iron hand around his eight-year-old arm and the flap of a black, wool sleeve in his tear-stained face as his mother closed the door and hardened her heart against his sobs. A final glimpse of the small, sturdy cabin in which he had been born and the slow, wide river where his laughing father had taught him to fish while the sun danced upon the water. His name and his language wrenched from him by the rod and the lash and replaced with Our Fathers and Hail Marys and 23rd Psalms.

No, it most certainly would not be the first time, but the more he thinks about it, the less likely it seems. The Church might be ruthless enough to pressgang a hapless doppelganger into service, willing or otherwise, but what were the odds that their bait would just happen to cross his path, and so close to home?

_Maybe it's me,_ he thinks, and sits back on his heels. Grit and scree crunch underfoot, and he scrubs his face with his hands and studies his untouched meal. _Maybe I'm hallucinating. Maybe that drifter I ate the night before last had more than cheap whiskey in his system. Maybe he had LSD or peyote, too, and I'm tripping my ass off. Maybe this bastard looks nothing like me at all, is some wizened bandit down on his luck and out of. time, and I'm squatting here like an idiot, letting a good meal go to waste and opening myself up to ambush by an audacious coyote._

_Or maybe it's that damn familiar,_ suggests a darker voice inside his head. _Maybe it slipped something into your supper and is waiting for you to hit the dirt. It's wanted Liese for itself since the day you brought her home, and only fear of you has kept it in line. With you out of the way, it will be free to take its chance, and with the baby to protect, Liese will be vulnerable. If it uses the baby as leverage, she will do anything it asks._

_If that's true, then what are you doing here? Stop mooning and feed, you damn fool._

He rocks forward on his toes, fangs bared, but he can't bring himself to sink them into the quivering flesh. The face above it is too like his own, a glimpse of a future that will never be, and the indistinct memories stirred by the helmet whisper that he should wait, that he might've found a treasure more valuable than a quick meal.

Liese. Liese will know what to do. If he is hallucinating, she will see the truth and guide him to it and coax him to his meal, and if he isn't, then perhaps she will have a rational explanation for this improbable jaunt into lunacy.

He closes his mouth. "This might be your lucky day, friend." He pats him on the shoulder and pulls him to a sitting position. He's dead weight at the end of his arm, and he's tempted to wrench the shoulder from the socket for the sheer, cold joy of it, but the shock might prove fatal, and he will hear no answers from the mouth of a dead man. So he stifles the impulse and heaves him over one shoulder instead. He dips to pick up the helmet.

"If you're useless, I'm going to fatten you up just to eat you," he mutters, and his frustrated stomach gives a mournful gurgle of agreement.

He'll have to return to the hunt, regardless. His veins thrum and burn with the need to feed, to glut himself on rich, warm blood from spurting throats, and his nerves sing with a call to the hunt. If he ignores it for too long, he will be driven to madness, to the mindless drive to tear and rend and kill, and the agony will devour his reason. He will hunt anything that breathes or twitches, and when he returns to himself, he will have blood on his mouth and drying beneath his nails and no memory of how it got there.

_If you're not careful, it could be Liese you tear apart, or little Anneliese, and neither of them would ever see it coming. Liese has never seen you in a blood frenzy. You are simply her beloved Johannes, the devoted husband who never touches her with anything but love, and to Anneliese, you are simply Vati, singer of lullabies and enthusiastic cheerleader as she toddles across the floor in pursuit of terrified dormice, all chubby fists and tiny, glinting fangs. She would never understand why her daddy was sinking his fangs into her wailing throat._

_And you would never forgive yourself._

His stomach sends up another urgent rumble, and he considers dropping his burden and gorging himself, but he has to know, and anyway, the cabin has come into view, a dim glow of lantern light in the distance. He's almost home.

_Yes, but what will you find?_ asks a voice that bears an unsettling resistance to his confessor, a man who died six months before he went to his rebirth in the bowels of Sola Mira, eaten alive by aggressive stomach cancer and consigned to God's mercy in a silk shroud richer than anything he had ever owned. _Will they be there, whole and smiling, to welcome you home, or will you open the door to find your daughter crumpled in her playpen and the familiar bucking between your wife's blood-smeared thighs?_

The image is incredibly vivid, and he quickens his pace. Scorpions and skinks skitter out of his path, and a thousand unseen hearts pound deep within the earth. It's a symphony he normally savors and lets lull him into a meditative state, but the loss of his family is all he can see, a fear so powerful that even his hunger is momentarily forgotten.

If he has lost them...

He bounds into what passes for the yard, a small square of hardpan between the cabin and a shabby lean-to that houses a pitchfork he's never used, the dry-rotted remnants of a wagon that list on one sheared axle, and a set of dangling chains whose purpose he has never discovered. A stone well stands in the center, and the moonlight glints off the rim of a battered, metal bucket.

"Liese!" he calls as he stalks up the sagging, wooden steps to the front door, and the slack hand of his cargo grazes his ass as it swings to and fro. "Liese!"

Footsteps sound beyond the door, and a moment later, it swings open to reveal Liese with a dishrag in her hand and fine wisps of golden hair in her face. "Johannes! You're home early. Is everything all right?" Her gaze shifts from his face to the leather-clad buttocks draped over his shoulder. Her brow furrows in confusion, and she retreats a step.

"Are you all right?" More brusque than he intends, and he reaches out to brush the hairs from her face.

"Yes. I'm fine. Anni is fine. Why wouldn't we be?" She covers his hand with her own and looks over his other shoulder in search of a hidden danger her mortal eyes cannot see.

_I thought the familiar was going to kill the baby and rape you._ He shakes his head. "I just saw something strange out in the desert."

"Stranger than you bringing your dinner home?" she teases, and steps back to grant him entry.

He pushes past her into the living room. "Oh, trust me, it's even stranger," he says. He takes two strides and dumps his burden onto the sofa.

She bolts the door and steps around him to see who he has brought into their home, and when she sucks in a breath, he knows he hasn't lost his mind.

_You see it, too._

"Is this a joke?" she asks, and approaches the couch for a closer look.

"If it is, I'm not privy to it. I found him dying in the desert."

"And you brought him home?" No rebuke, only curiosity. She kneels beside the couch and places her hands on either side of his neck.

"He...I just...I had to know if what I was seeing was real." _And I couldn't bring myself to kill a man with my face._

"His pulse is very weak. And erratic. He'll die if we don't get him hydrated. He needs I.V. fluids."

A harsh bark of laughter. "Those are beyond even me. Dearer to the Church Fathers than gold, the stingy bastards." His lip curls at the memory of lying on his cot in the barracks with nothing but a wet rag to dampen his tongue because they were out of ice and his dehydration wasn't deemed severe enough to merit one of the precious bags of fluid.

"Well, we'll have to improvise, because he's not going to make it if he doesn't get fluids." She traces the contours of his face with her pale, slender fingers, and Johannes feels an ugly pang of jealousy at the tenderness of it, especially when his erstwhile dinner presses into the touch.

_It's just the act of an animal seeking comfort in the time of its dying,_ he tells himself.

_And you would know all about that wouldn't you, my son?_ murmurs his confessor. _You sought it yourself, that comfort, in your time of dying. You lay on that dank, cold slab in the tatters of your cassock and called for God and Matthias and Liese, screamed for them until your voice failed and you could only mewl like a drowning kitten in a burlap bag as it sank into the black depths of a river. You recited Our Fathers and Hail Marys and begged your Father to save his faithful servant from the clutches of the enemy, and when He failed to appear in a blaze of splendor with your brothers and sisters and a host of angels at his side, you called for Liese. She had ever been faithful, your sweetest sister, had been your fiercest champion since childhood, when she had been eight years old and thrashing in the grip of a pitiless Father while another of his number beat you into unconsciousness one stinging lash at a time. She had never left you, never forsaken you, and so you called for her, with fraying voice and fading soul, so sure that she would come._

_But the lightless tunnel remained empty. Your Liese did not come, did not ease the agony and terror of your passing with her cool hands and soft lips and a prayer for your violated soul. You died alone in the dark with the stink of vampire shit in your nostrils._

And now this interloper with his face is getting the comfort he was denied. The envy sours and curdles in his belly, and he's tempted to tear her hands from his face and snap his neck, to toss him from the couch and stomp on him until his bones are so much jellied marrow inside his bones. Instead, he barks for the familiar, whom he can hear shuffling and skulking in the kitchen. Eavesdropping, no doubt.

That it materializes in the doorway at once only confirms his suspicion. "Water. Now. Enough for a bath."

"Yes, Master." It bobs its wizened, bloodless head on the tuberous stem of its neck and performs a queer, bobbling jig. "Warm, Master? Like the lady likes it?" Its blackened lips twist to reveal decaying gums and rotting teeth.

"No." Liese's voice, calm and authoritative. "Cool as you can manage."

The familiar shifts its muddy gaze to him.

"What are you waiting for?" he snaps. "Do as she says."

It quails and wrings its hands, and the flabby, colorless flesh reminds him of the squirming maggots that had covered the bones that had littered his subterranean nursery. "Of course, Master, right away, yes." Another uncoordinated bob, and it retreats into the kitchen.

Liese unzips their visitor's jacket and pushes it off his shoulders.

"What are you doing?" he demands.

"I need to get him out of these clothes. This leather might've protected him from the worst of the sun and sand, but it's also parboiling him." She hauls his twin up by the collar of his t-shirt and shoves the jacket down his arms.

_Good,_ he thinks with savage pettiness. _I hope it hurts._

She pauses in the act of looping a buttressing arm around slack shoulders. "Are you all right, my love?" She peers closely at him.

_My love?_ The endearment is a balm to his soul. His jaw twitches with the impulse to bare it, to let her soothe his bitterness with the sweetness of her caress, but how can he tell her he begrudges a dying animal its final comfort?

"I'm fine. It's just that I haven't fed."

Her face softens. "You must be starving. Well, I'm not sure he would've offered much. Looks like he hasn't eaten anything in days, and not regularly in months."

"Maybe not, but his blood smells divine. The only kind that smells purer is a Priest's." And a newborn child's but it's best she never know such a truth. For all that she has accepted of what he has become, there are some truths she might never abide, that might make her turn from him with contempt and loathing in her eyes. He cannot lose her or this paradise they have made, and so he will lie by omission without a twinge of conscience.

"Is he, do you think? Some new breed meant solely to hunt you?" She surveys her patient with new intensity.

"I thought about that," he admits. "But I don't think so." He holds up the helmet. "He was wearing this. There's something familiar about it, but I can't say what."

"That's a Judge's helmet," she says flatly.

_Judge._ The word unlocks the floodgates of memory, and he marvels that he should have forgotten. Judges were the "secular" arm of the Church, charged with keeping the peace within the city and punishing the sins of its inhabitants. They arrested or executed on the spot according to the magnitude of the sin committed, and like their frocked brethren of the cloth, they were segregated from the world and forbidden the pleasures of the flesh. No wine, women, or song, no friends with which to pass the lonely, grinding hours. Barracks rumor had it that they weren't children of God at all, but created in labs hidden in the depths of the great cathedral.

_Maybe that's why he looks like you. Maybe they stole part of you to make him._

He studies the face that lolls against Liese's arm. It's too old to have sprung from him, at least thirty-five, perhaps more. He was twenty-four when he was reborn in the image of his Queen.

_Maybe it's the other way around._

It's an uncomfortable thought, and he shies from it.

"Are you sure?"

She nods. "They increased fourfold after-" She trails off, and her Adam's apple bobs.

_After I fell,_ he finishes to himself. _After she was robbed of me, of a life together._

He closes the distance between them and rests a hand on her shoulder. He longs to hold her, but his hunger is too sharp, too dangerous. "A hunter, maybe?"

"If he is, they didn't prepare him for it. "No food, no water, no medical supplies. No- Wait. He _does_ have a weapon. A gun." She reaches for the holster at his hip.

"Don't!" he barks, and she flinches at his uncharacteristic harshness. "Forgive me, my Liese." He strokes her shoulder. "Anger is not my intent. Something tells me you shouldn't touch that. Something I heard in the barracks once, maybe, though I'll be damned if I can recall what."

"The Church would say you're damned already," she says slyly, and he blinks at her in surprise. 

"Was that a joke I just heard?"

"Oh, hush, you." Embarrassment turns her nape a lovely rose.

The hunger rises in him, a dark, insatiable leviathan, but he resists it with every ounce of the iron will imbued in him by his former masters. He will not feed on his Liese, will not betray her and sink his fangs into her unsuspecting neck. She is his light, his world, and he would be lost without her.

"You need to feed, love," she says softly. "I can feel the need in you." She reaches up to stroke the hand on her shoulder.

"I don't want to leave you alone with him." _Or with the familiar._

She twists to look at him. "I'll be fine, sweetheart. He's in no shape to do anything but what I will. Right now, it's all he can do to breathe. And you seem to forget that I was a Priestess once."

"I didn't forget. I have never forgotten." Liese, her hair a golden veil as she danced across the sand, her silver scythes ablaze in the moonlight. "It's just-"

_I already lost you once, when Matthias let me go. I spent four years without you, dreaming of you, yearning for you, fucking my own fist and pretending it was you, that I had emerged from the hive and wrested you from their draconian clutches and whisked you away to the life I promised you so long ago, when we were but children, stealing moments behind outcroppings on a hunt. I almost lost you again when Mariel betrayed us and they kicked in the door and dragged us out and left our baby to die in the desert heat. I watched them torture you for your love of me, for your refusal to renounce me, and call you the Devil's whore, and violate you in ways I never could. I can't endure that again._

_Are you so sure you will, my son? After all, for all your suspicion of the familiar, it was he who saved your baby when he came back from a foraging run to find her sunburned and puling in the sweltering heat and the house in shambles. It was he who cared for her until you could escape, and it was he who tracked you to the unlikely sanctuary of Hicks' homestead. You owe it the joyous scream that tore from your Liese's feverish throat when she saw the baby in your trembling arms. You owe it the precious memory of watching Liese give your squalling daughter suck while you lay beside them in the bed. If it weren't for it, you would have no family, only a glimpse of what might have been and a wife who wished only to follow her daughter into death._

Guilt wars with an unease he can't explain, and in his mind's eye, he sees the familiar settling itself between her unresisting thighs.

_Maybe it's the hunger. Or maybe it's another kind of hunger altogether. You got territorial the first time you were trying to sow a child within her, too._

His lips twitch at the memory, and at the sweet possibility the future holds.

She rises from her knees and turns to step into his arms. "I will be fine. We will be fine. If you're worried, you could always set a few pups on watch."

He wraps his arms around her. "Mmm. Perhaps I will. Where there's one Judge, there might be another."

Those lovely hands cup his face. "Help me get him into the tub, and then you need to go." She cranes to kiss him, and he receives her rosy lips with a sigh. "You'll be no good weak and sick, and when you get back, maybe I'll help you with that project of yours," she murmurs against his lips.

"You promise?" he growls, and molds her to him. His cock twitches inside his jeans.

She looks into his eyes. "I do."

He rises on his toes in a giddy bounce. "Then what are we waiting for?" He nudges her aside, picks up his erstwhile dinner, and stalks toward the bathroom.

"He's still mostly dressed," she calls after him, amused.

"Not for much longer," he replies jauntily.

 

The tub is only half-filled by the time he carries his now-naked houseguest into the bathroom. He's a warm stone in his arms, and his skin is dry and leathery. His breath is a shallow rasp.

_You've put up a valiant fight,_ he thinks as he eases him into the tepid water. _But I don't think it will be good enough._

Liese kneels beside the tub and picks up a washcloth, which she dips into the water and draws over the Judge's neck and collarbones. "There we go, now. There we go," she croons. The parched skin ripples beneath her touch, and the shallow rasp of his breath sharpens into a wheeze.

"Poor thing," she says quietly. "Look at him. Look what the world has done to him."

The body in the tub is a welter of bruises and scars, as though he's been mauled by a relentless beast. Circular puckers on his left shoulder, left forearm, right leg. A jagged wattle over his right pec, an old knife wound, like as not. A ragged, uneven pucker on the inside of his left thigh, just below his balls. A long, wide, ugly wattle below and to the left of his navel, a parting gift from a high-caliber round or the ruthless bite of a bayonet.

_Hello, brother,_ he thinks, and is surprised at the pity the thought inspires. Each wound prompts a bitter recognition of its cost in blood and pain. How often had the man in the tub felt the thud of a bullet or the startling, bloody kiss of a blade as it sank into his flesh and fought through the pain because to hesitate was to die? How often had he staggered back to his barracks with his wounds seeping beneath his clothes, face impassive, lest a grimace signal his weakness? Had he tended them himself, alone in his bunk and biting a dirty rag to stifle his screams as he probed his insulted flesh with bloody fingers? Had he begged for a painkiller, even one so inadequate as an expired aspirin, only to be told it it could not be spared, that God would provide all the comfort he required?

The familiar shuffles in behind him, steps around him with wary, cringing deference, and pours another bucket of water into the tub. The Judge stirs feebly at the sudden disturbance, and his torso arches against the cloth in Liese's hand.

"Oh, dove, it's all right. Sssh, shhh. It's just water."

"Dove?" he repeats incredulously. That tug of jealousy again.

"I have to call him something besides your uneaten takeout," she replies prosaically. "If we ever learn his name, I'll call him that." She's quiet for a moment as she presses the wet cloth to the side of his neck. "He'll be lucky to see morning. In the meantime, I can give him a little tenderness."

_Like you did for me?_ Petulant, and he immediately regrets it. It's unworthy of him, and unfair to his Liese. She would have fought through the very warrens of hell had she known he was alive, all blood and teeth and flashing scythes, but she was deceived by her ostensible brothers, was told he had gone to God and was thus beyond her reach. She had mourned him in defiance of the Church, and when she had learned the truth with the burning, blood-spattered sand beneath her knees, she had followed him without a backward glance. Her absence at his end was not her fault, but it is her deepest regret, and she carries the weight of it still.

Eyes flutter open, but they're glassy and unfocused and devoid of awareness. His head rolls mindlessly in the direction of her voice, and a swollen tongue peeks from between cracked, mottled lips.

"Hello, dove," Liese says, and cups his cheek. "My name is Liese, and you're safe now."

A low, grating noise from low in his throat, the scrape of sand-choked, ancient hinges, and the tip of his tongue extends with priapic urgency.

"I know. It's an awful mess." She strokes his shoulder and squeezes the rag over her lips.

The moan he produces as the first drops touch his lips is primitive, almost obscene in its animalistic need, and Johannes turns away, torn between morbid fascination and helpless envy. His fingers curl into fists. "I'm going," he says shortly. "I need to feed."

"All right, my love. May good fortune smile upon you."

"I love you. I'll be back as soon as I can."

"I love you, too. Beyond all measure of the world. Hurry back. I haven't forgotten about that project of yours."

He chuckles, pleased, and his fists unclench. "Oh? Looking forward to it, are we?"

"Immeasurably," she answers, and his heart soars. Let the interloper root at her gentle ministrations like a suckling babe abandoned to the pitiless bosom of the wood. It's him she loves, him she desires, and him to whom she'll open her willing thighs when he returns from the hunt.

"Let the hunt begin," he murmurs, and stalks from the room, his blood heated with the anticipation of the kill.


	2. Washed By the River Jordan

"Well," Liese sighs when Johannes has departed, "looks like it's just the two of us, dove."

There's little response from the man in the tub. It takes all of his strength to keep his eyes open, and even they droop.

"Don't fight sleep if you need it. You're safe here." She strokes his shoulder.

A faint grunt, and his unfocused gaze flicks to the dripping cloth in her hand.

"Oh. More water? All right, but let me see if I can't get you fresher. No reason to drink your own filth." She rises from her knees and scuttles to the sink, where she fills a small tumbler. She returns to the tub and kneels beside his head. She slides her free hand behind it and lifts it. He's weak as a newborn babe, and his head bobbles despite her support. "All right, now. Here we go." She tips the cool water into his mouth.

The guttural groan that escapes him is primal, and his hand scrabbles feebly for the glass. His hips buck with the effort, and water sloshes against the side of the tub with a petulant slap.

"No," she chides, and pulls the glass beyond his desperate reach. "You're too weak to hold it on your own, and I don't fancy picking glass out of my tub all night." Then, more softly, "I know you're so thirsty. I'm not trying to torment you. You've endured more than enough by the looks of you. But you must drink it slowly, or it will just come up again and do you no good. I'll give you all that you want, but you must trust me. Can you do that?"

She feels like an ogre as he eyes the glass' contents with almost erotic longing. _And so I have become a Father,_ she thinks with a pang of self-loathing that only deepens when he manages a feeble nod.

"Gratitude, brother," she says, and offers him another sip.

He suckles at the cup with infantile eagerness, and his throat works as he swallows. His body trembles with the effort of holding his torso even marginally upright.

_Weak as a kitten,_ she muses as he collapses against the back of the tub. She eases her buttressing hand free and sets the tumbler on the floor beside her. "You did so well," she croons as he gulps and pants with the effort. "I'll give you more once I'm sure that much stays down. Rest now." She strokes his forehead.

He doesn't speak, but his eyes do their best to track her as she picks up the cloth and resumes her gentle work. He needs a good scrub, but his skin is so dry that she's afraid it will tear, and so she contents herself with slow, patient strokes. Now and then, he twitches at the contact, as though his flesh were unaccustomed to touch, and she can't help but linger over these spots in an effort to bring him some measure of pleasure and comfort.

He moans softly when she reaches the crook of his elbow, and his eyelids flutter.

"You like that?" she asks softly, and repeats the motion. "There's no shame if you do. Touch is one of the Lord's gifts, much as the Fathers would like to deny it. Joyless old prunes."

She's surprised when he croaks, "Blasphemy."

She raises an eyebrow. "The Fathers are not God, last I checked."

"The law..."

"They're not that, either, though how they do like to make it up." She draws the cloth over his skin again and elicits another helpless moan.

"Why?" he manages. It's a grating whisper.

"Do they make it up? The power, I suppose."

He shakes his head. "Why?" he repeats, and tries to lift his arm.

Comprehension dawns. "Because all of God's creature's deserve to be touched with kindness. Such touch is a filament of His Grace, if you ask me, but the Fathers seem bent on keeping the people isolated and angry and miserable."

His brow furrows. "Blasphemy."

"No, it isn't," she says cheerfully, and continues to tease the touch-starved flesh in the crook of his elbow. "But if you truly believe that, I'll stop."

"No," he rasps quickly. Then, as though ashamed of his need, "No."

"I told you, there is no shame in enjoying touch." She sidles along the side of the tub to reposition herself. "I was starved for it since I was a little girl, beaten and starved and dehydrated until I learned to obey my masters. Kindness was a distant dream, and if I reached for it, I was bloodied and broken until I saw the error of my ways. And all the while, my masters preached love." She snorts. "Hypocrites. All I ever felt was fear and hatred."

She draws the cloth over his forearm and watches the skin prickle and ripple with gooseflesh. "The first time I felt a loving touch, I felt drunk with it. I couldn't get enough. I never wanted it to stop. I never knew such pleasure could exist in the world. And it was just the caress of my love's hand." An impish smile. "Of course, I learned very quickly that there were far greater pleasures to be had."

There's no response from him, and she finds that he's drifted away again, eyes closed and mouth slack. She's disappointed but hardly surprised. The only surprise is that he was lucid and conscious at all. He should be breathing his last, dehydrated and malnourished as he his. That he's made it this far is a miracle.

_They say the Judges are all made of sterner stuff, like priests. Blessed by God, according to the Church Fathers, but darker rumors whispered by more audacious tongues hint they weren't made by God at all, but fashioned by men in secret laboratories in the bowels of the Cathedral complex, gestated in amniotic tanks and midwifed into the world by gloved hands. I dismissed it as gossip, a bit of macabre fancy conjured by up by the morbid imaginations of bored priests seeking an escape from their own privations and trials, but now I don't know. He should be dead, should've been dead days ago, and he looks so much like Johannes that he makes my blood race._

_It would explain his resilience if he were a clone, a mockery of the divine fashioned from a fragment of stolen soul. If the Church made him in defiance of God and the natural order, they could mold him into anything they chose. A golem with a human face, mindless and blindly obedient and willing to continue fighting and killing even as it stepped on its own entrails. Unquestioning, devoid of love or compassion or the need for either, without mercy and utterly unaware of its lack in its manufactured soul._

_He's not an it,_ she thinks, disgusted. _However he came by his soul, he has one, and even if he were made by the hubris of the Fathers, he is no less deserving of love and kindness, of which I suspect he has had so very little._

"What have they done to you?" she murmurs as her unhurried inspection of his body reveals more thin, ropy strands of scarred flesh, more puckers and divots and angry, toothless wattles. It's an inhumane and inhuman catalogue of wounds and insults, most of them indifferently tended, and her throat constricts with helpless indignation. If the Fathers created him, then they certainly extracted more than their pound of flesh for the dubious privilege of the life they gave him. He was nothing but a tool to them to be used, and now that he is down to pith and sinew and the tenacious survival instinct with which they endowed him, they have discarded him and left him to die. They could not even summon the mercy to grant him a swift and painless death.

_Why does that surprise you, Sister?_ Johannes murmurs inside her head, as yet untouched by death and dark conversion, and his hazel eyes gleam with sardonic amusement. _Have you so quickly forgotten how they treated us, their chosen children? They told our parents we were special, born of Divine writ for a purpose only God would determine. They tore us from our families, heedless of our cries and entreaties, and carried us across the wastes of the world to isolate us in their godly fortresses. We were touched by God, and yet they treated us like chattel. We were stripped of our names and our histories were scourged from us one beating at a time, and if we dared cling to the memories of home and family and cried for them in the night, if we dared to be the frightened, lost children we were, they tied us before the altar of the god they claimed to serve, tore the flimsy fabric of robes we never asked for from our skinny backs, and beat us into submission or insensibility, whichever came first._

_How many times did you watch them beat me into a twitching, bloody heap when I was eight years old and still looking for the parents who had closed their door against me, traded me for the right to keep their fishery? How often did you snap and snarl against the restraining hand tangled in the fabric of your acolyte's cassock and howl at them to stop, stop flaying me to bloody rags while I sagged at the post and my eyes rolled by in my head? How often did you listen to me scream when they poured salt into the wounds to stave off an infection that would rob them of their investment? How many times did you watch the older acolytes glide through the darkness of the barracks like wraiths to carry away the bodies of those too weak to endure the training and privation? How many times did you wake in the morning to find that it was as though they had never been? One fewer cot in the precise rows that lined the dormitory, one fewer place at the table, one fewer name to be expunged from tongues and hearts._

_Don't you remember, my sweetest sister, how they punished us for the natural urges of our growing, awakening bodies? They called us to Mass and rained the wrath of God upon our bewildered, bowed heads, pounded the pulpits and thundered about the sins of Eve and Onan. When a boy spilled his seed in the throes of a helpless dream, they called him a sinner and flogged the impure thoughts from his bones and forced him to beg forgiveness until his tongue cracked and bled, and when you were twelve years old and your first bleed was wet and bright on your coltish, frightened thighs, a Church Mother with leathery, ruthlessly-efficient fingers dragged you into the bathroom and peered and prodded between your legs to make sure it did not come from an even greater uncleanness. And so it went for every cycle and every mission, gelid eyes and comfortless fingers forcing themselves between your legs and into your sacred places. No privacy, no dignity, no part of yourself they could not bare to their avid scrutiny, could not sully with their cold, clucking disdain. No part of yourself that you could call your own._

_And surely you remember the day the punished you for the crime of sight. You happened to see a couple knowing one another in the not-so-concealing shelter of an alleyway, and because you did not avert your eyes before they could register the affront to God that they beheld, they tied you to the post to which they had so often and so gleefully tethered me and introduced you to the Lord's tenderest kiss. And this time, it was I who had to watch as the knout licked your bare flesh and your blood rolled down your back to dapple the floor, holy water sprinkled over penitent flesh._

_As I recall, you didn't protest. In fact, you rather enjoyed it._

_And that is my shame. I was only a boy, seventeen and longing and ashamed. I have never forgiven the traces they left upon your flesh, and when I get my hands on Orelas and Chamberlain, their ends with be as lingering and agonizing as I can make them._ Eyes the color of summer honey now, and slender fangs peek from beneath his upper lip.

_My point is, wife of my heart, that if they treated us so cruelly when they called us the chosen children of God, why would they care any more kindly for one who had nothing of God's grace in its making? He's just a tool, of no more consequence than a starving dog trained to kill for its keep. If he dies, they'll just make another, and another, refining as they go, until it is as perfect as their twisted minds deem it, and they will waste not a single breath on sentiment or regret._

A stroke of the cloth against his gun-callused fingers produces a glottal whimper, and she looks down the length of the tub and sees a glint of hazel from beneath slitted eyelids. There's little awareness in his glassy gaze; the gentle touch has simply prompted a limbic response from a tortured, likely-dying body.

_No one deserves to die like this, ravaged and discarded and frightened._ In her mind's eye, she sees Johannes, lying on a filthy slab in the profane heart of the hive in Sola Mira, helpless beneath a thousand voracious, blindly-seeking mouths, his life slipping away with every greedy, lascivious suckle and triumphant lap of a gelid tongue. Dying in the fetid, clammy darkness with his ragged pleas ringing in his ears. It is the stuff of her worst nightmares, and even now, after two years of isolated bliss, she still wakes in the brightness of their night with a scream lodged in her throat and her heart pounding inside her chest and searches for the solidity of him in their bed. More often than not, her racing heart pulls him from slumber and he draws her into the sleep-warm curl of his body to murmur endearments and reassurances into her hair until sleep reclaims her.

_Sleep, my Liese, sleep. It's all right. I'm here._ Ice and iron and cardamom on his breath.

"You deserved better," she tells the stranger with her love's face. "For as long as you stay here, you will have the kindness you should have had in another life." It's the least she can do for such a battered soul.

_Are sure it's him you're doing it for?_ ask Priestess Mariel with cold, needling hauteur. _Maybe you're doing it for someone else. Maybe you're doing it for yourself._

She turns from the thought with a sniff. She won't be lectured by a traitor who would have gladly doomed a newborn to an agonizing death beneath the desert sun and her former wards to death by torture and crucifixion.

_So what if I am? I thought atonement was good for the soul, a step on the narrow path to true salvation._

Her charge doesn't stir again until she washes his thigh. He flinches at the contact, and when she looks up, he's watching her in logy befuddlement.

"Forgive me, brother. I didn't mean to startle you. I need to get the sand out of your thigh creases so you don't chafe. Would you like more water? I think it's safe to give you more."

She's not sure how much he understands, but the mention of water penetrates the addling fog, and he manages a bobbling nod. She sidles along the tub and picks up the tumbler. "Water, coming up." She slips her hand beneath his head and eases it upward.

His throat works as he gulps the contents to the last drop. "More," he rasps, and lets his head loll in her hand. "More. Please."

"All right," she soothes. "I'm going to set your head down so I can go to the sink." She lowers his head to the rounded lip of the tub and rises with a groan. "I haven't been on my knees so much since my priestess days. I should've brought a pillow." She hobbles to the sink and refills the glass. "Like as not, I'll have bruises in the morning." She sighs and grimaces as she returns to the floor, hard as stone now beneath her smarting knees. "I've borne them for lesser causes, so I shouldn't complain. Here we go, now." She offers him the glass again.

The entire focus of his being is on extracting the ambrosia from the glass, and he shakes and twitches with the urgency of his task. He scarcely pauses for breath, and his hand claws spasmodically at the gritty water.

"Easy, dove. There's no need to rush. You'll have your fill." She splays her buttressing fingers and massages his scalp. He's so startled that he arches. She sets the glass down and cups the side of his neck. "It's just me. Just my fingers. I won't hurt you." She lowers his head again. "Not much longer, sweetness, and then we can get you out and get some food into you."

"F'd?" His head lolls in her direction.

A soft chuckle. "That got your attention. Yes, food. I can't promise it'll taste that great, but it'll fill you and warm your belly, and it's full of vitamins. We fed it to Anni when she was small. Still do now and then."

She picks up the washcloth again. "I have to wash you," she says. "Forgive my impertinence, but it's a necessary indignity; if sand gets in there, it can be very painful. I've learned from hard experience."

He's docile until she grips him, and then his eyes widen and he begins to thrash. "No," he croaks with as much authority as he can muster. "No, no. I am a Judge. Unjudicial contact is forbidden..." He scrabbles at her hand, and the ragged nails score the top of her palm.

She smothers a hiss at the spark of pain. "Forgive me, brother. I mean no insult to your vows, but I must clean you. This isn't lustful trespass. It's medical care."

He subsides, but she can feel him thrumming, and his breathing is rapid and shallow, a cornered rabbit.

"I'm sorry," she croons. "I'm so sorry. I'll work as quickly as I can." She carefully peels back his foreskin and winces at the angry, red irritation she exposes. Urine scald from lack of adequate water or bathing facilities, she suspects. "Oh, sweetness, you've scalded." _It must hurt like hell._ "It needs to be cleaned, but I need fresh water, so I'm going to wait until the tub is drained, all right? There's too much grit in here." She gently releases his foreskin. "I'm going to clean between your buttocks, all right?"

Silence from the head of the tub, and she's not sure if it's exhaustion or pique that holds his tongue. She works as quickly as possible to minimize his mortification and her embarrassment, and then she moves to the foot of the tub.

"I'm sorry," she repeats, and picks up a foot. "I know what it's like to be touched against your will." Her skin prickles and burns with the memory of restraining fingers sinking into the straining flesh of her thighs, the cool, diseased bite of rusted manacles around her wrists and ankles. The crisp efficiency of the acolyte who tore her robes away and exposed her to avid, leering gazes. The insistent, invasive thrust of plastic tubing between her legs. The scouring rush of saltwater over her tenderest flesh, still bruised and swollen from childbirth. Johannes' howls of impotent rage and the creak of the rack as he bucked and strained against his his bonds.

He says nothing, but he watches her with half-lidded eyes as she picks up a foot and cradles it in wet palms. His breathing is deep and even, and she can't shake the sense that he's assessing her. A slow blink of his eyes.

_Did I pass?_ she wonders, but she only spreads his toes and sets about cleaning out the grit and sour, dead skin.

She doesn't speak again until she's made a full circuit of the tub. Her charge has succumbed to exhaustion again, and the tub is dark with grit and sloughed skin. "Familiar," she calls, and shifts on her knees to alleviate the pressure.

Furtive scuffling from the hallway behind her. "Yes, mistress?" Nasal and wheedling, eager to please, and in her mind's eye, she sees it sidling from foot to flabby, bloodless foot and wringing its fleshless hands in a ceaseless, peristaltic twist, a baker working long-decayed dough.

"I need warm water and a dipper, please."

"Yes, mistress. Yes, yes." Phlegmatic, rattling breath. "He looks like the master. Is he, perhaps, kin?"

"Who he is is no concern of yours," she retorts sharply. "What concerns you is doing as you are told, or do you, perhaps, need a refresher course in knowing your place?"

"No, mistress, no." It quails and retreats before she can put action behind her words.

"How about a treat?" she asks the Sleeping Beauty in her tub when the familiar returns with a bucket of warm water and a dipper. She shuts the door in the cringing familiar's muddy-eyed face.

Not a peep from the tub, but the instant the warm water sluices over his head, he arches in the tub, and his mouth opens in a worshipful gape.

"I thought you might like that," she says, and lowers the dipper into the bucket for another scoop. "I never felt clean after a hunt until my hair was. The dust and grit made me itch so much." She works her fingers through the short strands and ferrets out flecks of and and dry scalp, and he practically purrs beneath her hands.

"That's right, sweetness. Just relax. I've got you." She pauses to pour more water over his head and then resumes her work. He arches against her massaging fingers, but does not wake.

_So starved for touch that he seeks it even in sleep,_ she muses.

_So was your abomination,_ Mariel reminds her with a sneer. _Even before he wormed his way between your harlot's legs with his unholy prick and wrought that smiling, squealing little obscenity in your belly, he couldn't get enough of your touch. He molded himself to you in your bed, entangled your limbs with his and pressed his lips to the hollow of your throat, a banked ember against your flesh, and he followed you from room to room like a lovesick cur, moon-eyed and adoring and always finding excuses to pull you to him and press kisses to the welcoming stem of your neck or pull you onto his lap while he read in his study. To be parted from you was more than he could stand, and he filled your days with kisses and caresses and languid hours of dozy cuddling._

_And I enjoyed every moment of it,_ she thinks defiantly, and cards her fingers through wet hair. Another dipper of water.

_Of course you did._ The wormwood and gall of contempt on her serrated tongue. _And when he finally achieved the sinful rut of his hidden, perverse dreams, it got no better. His need for touch was insatiable. His hands were everywhere--on your hips, your breasts, your throat, the heaving plane of your stomach as he defiled you with his slithering, covetous tongue, clamped around your wanton thighs hard enough to bruise as he staked his claim and you yowled like the devil's concubine._

_The Devil's concubine? Is that truly what you think me, sister? A mindless, spraddle-legged whore moved only by lust?_ she asks sadly. _Why does love disgust you so?_

_He is an abomination!_ she cries, and her eyes blaze inside her haggard, lined face. The point of her wooden leg stamps the stone floor of the barracks, the sharp, cruel snap of the lash. _He is a monster, incapable of love. That is a grace he forfeited when he allowed himself to be polluted by the queen and turned to her diabolical will. What he feels for you is only lust, low and animal and shameful, and you will burn for abiding it._

_Then I will burn,_ she retorts simply. _He is my husband, and I will not be ashamed of his touch, his love. And you may call him a monster, but at least he never left an innocent child to die on the desert sand in the name of God's righteousness._ She thinks of Anneliese, six weeks old and sunburnt and starving and hot as a guttering coal in her trembling, disbelieving arms. Squirming and squalling for the breast and desperate for the comfort of her parents.

_No. He just tears out their throats and feasts on their blood, and then he comes home and spends his lust between your thighs._

_He does what he must to survive, just as any of God's creatures would,_ she counters obdurately, and gropes behind her for the shampoo. "I bet you'll like this. I'm not sure what you're about to smell, like, though. We use whatever the familiars bring home." She pops the cap and sniffs. "Mmmm, you're in luck. Lemongrass, smells like. We got some that smelled like tar once. I'm not even sure it was shampoo." She squeezes some into her palm and begins to work it into his hair.

Another purr from the man beneath her hands, and his eyes flutter open.

"Hello, lovely. There you are again. It's just shampoo. We're almost finished, and then we can get you dry and comfortable and fed. If the familiar has any sense, it's working on your porridge." Gruel was probably closer to the truth, but even starving men have standards, and there's no reason to poison him against it before she's wrangled the first spoonful down his gullet.

"F'd," he says.

"Yes, food. I promise. But it will taste all the better if you're clean when you eat it. Tell me if I'm scrubbing too hard."

A nigh-imperceptible shake of his head and another helpless purr.

She settles back on her knees and loses herself to the rhythm of scrubbing her charges head. He blinks logily at her, and maybe it's wishful thinking born of her previous train of thought, but she sees bliss in his eyes.

_Oh, lovely._ "You have lovely eyes," she says. "Do they hurt?"

A slow nod. 

"Probably dry. I'll see if we have any drops for them once we get you settled. Would you like more water before I start rinsing your hair?"

Another, more vigorous nod.

She washes her hands in the tub and picks up the tumbler. "Down the hatch." She supports his head and watches as he slurps at the glass with uncoordinated fervor, and when it's empty, she eases him back and rinses her hands again. 

She rinses his hair with the same persnickety care with which she'd washed it, humming as she works, and all the while, he gazes up at her with the dazed contentment of a sleepy child.

_You'll sleep well tonight, I'd wager,_ she thinks as his eyelids droop again.

_If he doesn't slip into darker waters,_ murmurs a sly, morbid voice inside her head, but she ignores it. She is his cause now, and she will not surrender him without a fight.

_Like you surrendered your Johannes?_ needles the pitiless voice of conscience. _Abandoned him to his fate on the faithless word of a lesser brother for whom you held no love?_

_Be silent,_ she chides her remorseless, untiring fetch. _I have done my penance and made my apologies to the only one who matters._

_Yes, and you'll go on doing it with every roll and snap of your craven hips in your "marriage bed,_ Mariel sneers.

She pushes to her feet and pulls both towels from the age-blackened towel rack on the wall behind her. _To the infernal pit with you, old bitch,_ she snarls, and drops to her protesting knees again.

"All right, lovely, the end comes. I'm going to let the water out, and then we'll have to see to the unpleasant business of cleaning your genitals."

He scowls at her with bedraggled vehemence. "Unjudicial touching is forbidden," he announces, and tries to sit up.

"I know you'd rather not, and if we were within reasonable distance of an apothecary, I would respect your wish, but the nearest apothecary is three days' ride by motorcycle and a week's walk. An infection out here is a death sentence."

"Unjudicial touching-," he repeats stubbornly.

"-is irrelevant out here," she interrupts. She sighs and cradles his face. "Here there is only survival or death. I know you are a Judge. I know the vows you took, and I would not ask you to violate them. I am only asking that you let me give you the chance to survive." When he says nothing, she presses on. "I don't know what brought you to my door in the middle of this godforsaken place, but here you are, in defiance of all reason. You have made it this far. Do not waste this miracle in the name of empty pride. Do not make me watch you die." Her voice thickens with the weight of tortured memory.

A long, stony silence. Then, a slow blink, and his body goes slack in wordless acquiescence.

She bows her head in gratitude. "Thank you. I will work as quickly as I can, I give you my word." She quashes the impulse to seal her oath with a kiss to his wet forehead. Instead, she releases his face and reaches for the slender chain of the drain plug. A sharp tug, and the stopper releases with the throaty gurgle of rushing water.

"All right, sweetness," she says when the last of the water is gone. "It's time. I suspect it will smart, probably a great deal, but I'll work quickly, and if we're lucky, I won't have to do this again because you'll be strong enough to see to yourself." She fills the dipper water and holds it over his groin, which lies flaccid and inert against his leg. "Are you ready?"

He sets his jaw. "Yes." The grating rasp of bone on petrified wood.

She gives a brusque nod, and she uses her thumb and forefinger to retract his foreskin. His thighs twitch at the importunate touch, and she knows he wants to retreat, to recover himself from her presumptuous fingers and regain his overthrown dignity, but he only rests his head on the back of the tub and fixes his gaze on the ceiling.

"Here comes the water. It will sting." She tips the contents of the dipper onto the head of his penis.

A muscle in his jaw twitches, and he hisses through his teeth, but no more, not even a grunt. His fingers curl around the edges of the tub.

"I'm sorry. One more ladle of water, and then I'll dry you, and it's done. Are you ready?"

"Just do it." The short, sharp bark of authority.

_There you are, Judge._ She refills the dipper from the bucket and raises it again. "As you say." She pours it over the irritated flesh, sets the dipper aside and reaches for one of the towels.

"Here comes the drying," she warns, and dabs at him.

The hissing between his teeth sharpens, and his grip on the sides of the tub tightens until the ceramic squeaks in protest, but he doesn't cry out, and she can't help a pang of admiration for his grim, dogged fortitude.

_You're a tough one, brother._ "There." She gives him a final pat and releases his foreskin, and is wholly unsurprised when he lets out a rattling breath and sags into the damp embrace of the tub, wan and sapped of his fleeting strength.

She drapes the towel over his groin in a bid to grant him a modicum of privacy. "Thank you, brother. The worst is done now. All that's left is to get you dry. Then we'll get you into the bedroom and feed you, and you can sleep." She picks up the remaining towel and begins to dry him.

She works with gentle vigor, and by the time she reaches his head, a hint of color has crept into his pasty cheeks. She's patting the water from his nape when he asks, "Who are you?"

"A friend. As I told you before, my name is Liese."

His brows knit in confusion. "I don't...remember."

A soft huff as she sets upon his hair. "I shouldn't wonder. Frankly, I'm surprised you're talking to me now. We were sure you'd be dead in an hour when my husband brought you home."

The furrow in his brow deepens as his mind struggles to grasp at something beyond its faltering reach. "Husband?"

"I'm sure you have questions. I would, too, were I in your place. But all you need to concern yourself with for the time being is food and a good night's rest. There'll be plenty of time to talk when you're stronger."

The suggestion meets no resistance. He's flagging again, and he's putty in his hands as she wrings as much water as she can from his hair. He might be a dogged survivor, but he's still incredibly weak, and if pneumonia should gain a foothold, he'll be dead within days, another carcass left to the claim of the desert sand. The thought of those lovely, familiar eyes filled with sand and shriveled in their decomposing sockets makes her stomach churn, and she redoubles her efforts.

_Not this time,_ she thinks as she rubs the short, brown strands between folds of cotton that will never be soft enough. _Not this time._

 

There's not a peep from him as she and the familiar lift him from the tub, and he's boneless as they carry him down the narrow hallway to the small bedroom into which she's rarely set foot, though, bless his fierce soul, he manages to blink up at her like a sedated sloth. The helpless vulnerability in his eyes inspires a dull ache inside her chest.

"Almost there, sweetness," she murmurs as they sidle into the turn through the door. "A warm bed."

"A bit cramped," the familiar chortles, its flabby hands curled around the Judge's ankles like fat, slick grubs. It offers her a blackened grin.

She'd love to rebuke it, but it's right. The room is tiny and choked with the bric-a-brac of past lives lived within these walls. The narrow bed cowers against the far wall, cowed by the looming presence of a listing, mismatched wardrobe that hovers over it like a menacing drunk, and the adjacent wall is lined with chairs and old trunks and paintings in tarnished frames. Clothes top the trunks like deflating meringues, and the bolts of fabric she'd used for her wedding robes are propped in the corner like halberds left behind by errant guards. She nearly steps into an old, brass chamber pot.

"All this old junk!" she hisses as she steps over the chamber pot and nearly slips on the Judge's shucked leathers. "Aren't you supposed to clean in here?"

The familiar cringes and offers what it no doubt hopes is a winsome grin. "Oh, no, mistress. Master forbids me to come in here. This is his treasure room." It waves an expansive hand at the clutter and performs an awkward, bobbing curtsy, a blighted popinjay in the opening steps of a doomed mating dance.

She raises an eyebrow. "Treasure room?" she repeats dubiously, and scans the crumbling dunes of jumble and junk.

"Yes, mistress." An eager nod. "That's what he calls it, and I do not question." It squeezes the Judge's ankles with fretful, peristaltic regularity.

_Of course you don't. The first time I saw you, he threatened to unzip your decaying guts for so much as looking at me._ She makes a mental note to ask Johannes about this magpie's hoard of eclectic nothing and everything.

"I see. Well, for the time being, his treasure room is now a guest room."

"Perhaps this will prove his greatest treasure," it simpers, and caresses a tanned ankle.

"I believe that position is already taken," she sniffs, and spares it a gelid glare.

She watches at the realization of the insult implied by its rash words penetrates its brain. If it had blood to spare for the task, it would drain from its cadaverous face. "Of course, most exalted mistress. I would never imply that master would ever look to anyone but you." It cringes and retreats, and the hapless figure between the tautens like overstretched taffy.

She rolls her eyes. "Oh, stow it. Just help me get him into bed. Is his porridge ready yet?" 

"Yes, mistress, yes," and its soft, bloated hands wring the Judge's ankles. It scuttles sideways toward the bed, and the body between them lists to the left. "Porridge ready in three minutes."

"Be careful!" she barks as she high-steps sideways to catch up and realign her patient's painfully-torqued body. Through it all, he hangs between them like a defeated standard.

"Forgive, mistress. Forgive." It cringes in anticipation of a blow, and she wonders, not for the first time, just how Johannes exacts its unstinting obedience.

"Just help me sit him on the bed and then see to that porridge. He won't have the wherewithal to eat it for much longer." She heaves his upper half onto the thin, narrow mattress and slides her hands beneath his shanks to gain leverage. She takes a deep breath and lifts from her knees and hitches him backward until his ass is beneath him on the edge of the bed.

_Thanks for nothing, you servile waste of skin,_ she thinks bitterly as her back gives a mutinous twinge, and she pulls her slack human cargo upright. _I used to be a finely-honed, unbreakable weapon of God, and now I'm turning myself into a pretzel trying to revive my husband's takeout._

_I told you you would rue the path you have so foolishly chosen, sister,_ Mariel crows inside her head, and the point of her wooden leg raps the cold barracks stone with a jaunty snap, a celebratory palm slapped to the age-blackened wood of a tavern table.

_Oh, shut it, you miserable crone,_ she thinks dourly. _The day will come when Johannes will unzip your guts and leave them for the carrion crows._

"I've got it from here," she growls over her shoulder. "Make yourself useful in the kitchen."

A heavy, rolling thud as the familiar drops the man's bare feet, and she smothers the impulse to round on it and deliver a stinging blow for its bumbling idiocy. "Yes, mistress," it says, and she hears the furtive, papery rasp of palm on palm.

"Fool thing," she mutters when its shuffling steps recede beyond her hearing, and her jaw creaks and pops with the sudden release of tension. "I'm sorry, lovely. Let's get you under the covers, hm?"

His head lolls on the thick stem of his neck, and his eyes find her with a herculean effort. "'M tired," he slurs.

"I know you are, dove. Try to stay with me just a bit longer so you can eat. I'm going to stand you up so I can pull the covers down, all right? Do you think you can help me?"

He tries, bless his soul, but he's too weak, his body too ravaged by its ordeal, and the best he can manage is an uncoordinated totter while he slumps against her, his feet scrabbling and skidding like a newborn foal's on the rough-grained wood.

"You tried," she murmurs, and slides an arm around his waist. "You tried so hard for me, and that's all anyone can ask." She smooths his hair and does her best to steady him as he slaloms to the right. He's heavy, far more solid than his spare frame suggests, and she suspects she'll feel this in her back and shoulders in the morning, a low simmer in her muscles that will dog her for days. She cranes over his shoulder to peer at the bed and reaches around him to tug blindly at the piebald patchwork quilt that tops it.

She sets him down with a groan and is surprised to see that he's half-hard, the irritated head of his cock peeking from beneath his foreskin. "Well, at least we know you're alive," she says drily, and presses a hand to the small of her back to ease the dull ache at the base of her spine.

He blinks owlishly at her and then drops his gaze to his crotch. His brows furrow as he studies it. "'S not auth'rized to do that," he mumbles nonsensically.

She stifles a bark of laughter. "Actually, sweetness, I don't think it gives a fig for authorization. It's the most natural thing in the world. Don't worry about it." She eases him onto the pillows and lifts his legs onto the bed.

He shudders convulsively as she draws the thin, cotton sheet over him, and she swallows against the sudden lump in her throat and strokes his leg from quadricep to shin. "There we are. You're all right now. The food will be here in a minute."

The mention of food perks him up again. "F'd." Decisive, and the flesh of his leg bunches and ripples beneath her hand.

As though on cue, the familiar appears with a small, wooden tray. "Yes, food," it says. "Good, hot food. Porridge with a little butter and a drizzle of clover honey."

"Oh, it got fancy for you."

The familiar's hairless head bobs in giddy agreement. "Yes, very fancy for the master's twin." It sets the tray on the edge of the nightstand beside the bed. "Will the mistress require anything else?" Its hands wring and wring and wring.

"Do you have anything for his eyes?" She gestures at the Judge's dry, red-rimmed eyes.

The familiar shuffles over for a closer look, and for a moment as it gingerly lifts an eyelid and inspects the inflamed sclera, she sees of the glimpse of the man it must have been before it crossed Johannes' path and found itself bound to eternal servitude. Then it straightens as much as its perpetually-hunched shoulders allow and favors her with an obsequious grin, and the present swallows the past whole.

"I might, yes," it answers. "Yes, indeed. Something cool and hydrating."

"Is he in danger of going blind?"

It purses necrotic lips in a contemplative moue. "Unlikely. The corneas are very dry. No water. But if we keep them wet, his eyelashes won't scratch them."

"How soon can you make something?"

"If I have what I need? An hour."

"An hour?"

It hunches its slumped shoulders at her displeasure. "Forgive, mistress, but making such potions cannot be rushed."

"No, I suppose not." She runs her fingers through her hair. "Do what you can as quickly as you can, then. And bring a pitcher of water and a glass."

"Yes, mistress, yes." It bows and scrapes and wrings it hands, and then it turns and shambles from the room.

She turns to the nightstand and picks up the bowl of pap. "The feast is on, sweetness." She perches precariously on the edge of the bed and smothers a squawk of surprise when he sits up with surprising speed and nearly topples her in his eagerness to feed.

"Easy, dove." She laughs softly. "I am not the Church. I will not make you beg and grovel and suffer for your daily bread." She dips the spoon into the thick porridge and offers it to him.

He lunges for it, mouth agape, a ravenous toddler, and it would be funny if she weren't so intimately familiar with the long torments that lay behind it. The privation. The sneaking certainty that every bite you took was begrudged by those who provided it. The need for more when none was forthcoming.

She feeds him in silence. She will not make him sing for his supper, a starveling dog made to dance for a scrap from his master's outstretched hand, and when the familiar arrives with a pitcher of water and a tiny glass bottle filled with a clear solution, she helps him drink his fill of the former. He cleans the bowl, and he suspects he'd lick it to a high shine if she let him, but when she's scraped the last of the meal from the bottom and sides and delivered it to his mouth, she sets it on the nightstand.

"Is there more?" he rasps, and the forlorn hope in his voice inspires a pang of guilt.

"No, sweetness. I wish there were, but supplies are short, and I don't want to test your stomach too severely."

He scowls at that unwanted pronouncement, but says nothing. He sags against his pillows.

"I wish I could give you a different answer, I truly do. I know what it's like to need more than you've been given. But we're far from the nearest settlement, and the baby makes it hard to travel. If we're lucky, there'll be a delivery tomorrow." 

"Baby?" he croaks. "Baby here?"

"My little imp, Anneliese."

She can see the questions written all over his face, the desire to draw answers from her, but he lacks the strength to voice them. All that emerges is a frustrated hum.

"There's that Judge's curiosity of yours," she teases. Lord, how he reminds her of Johannes before his transformation, reserved and stubborn and relentlessly curious, full of questions he seldom voiced but that drove him to seek their answers, nonetheless, in the Church archives, with their yellowing, leatherbound tomes and wavering, distorted holosermons, in scraps of paper filched from the death rooms of those for whom he delivered last rights or ushered new life into the world, in the fragments he patiently unearthed from the desert sands on a hunt, and in the snatches of gossip he plucked from the markets and commissaries on his rounds. "There will be time for you to mount an investigation tomorrow. I'll answer any question you like then."

She's rewarded with a mutinous scowl that reminds her so much of Johannes in a fit of pique that she laughs.

"I'm sorry, Your Highness, but it's the best I can do. It's been a long day, and I still have a baby to put to bed. In the meantime, the familiar has made some drops for your eyes. Lie back for me?"

The food has fortified him enough that he hesitates and spares her that cool, assessing gaze again.

_Good._ "I assure you they're safe. The familiar knows what will happen if I am displeased, and it values its life."

He raises an eyebrow. "You threaten it with murder? That's a capital offense."

_Oh, yes, you're definitely on the mend,_ she thinks with wry amusement. "If it were human, it would be, but it forfeited that designation long ago. The Church commands that familiars be executed on sight, does it not? Or has it changed in my absence?" 

He studies her in rheumy-eyed silence, and for the first time in years, she's keenly aware of the cross tattooed on her forehead. "No." Then, "You're a priestess." The vibrato growl of a tiger crouched in the concealing brush.

"I am."

He lies back. "What are you doing out here?"

She picks up the glass bottle. "What did I tell you about questions?" She uncorks the bottle and uses its bulb dropper to suck some of the solution into the pipette.

"You're supposed to be celibate." Undaunted.

"And you're supposed to be enforcing the law in the city, but here we are. I was celibate for a long time, and then I wasn't." She gently raises his eyelid. "This might sting."

"Unlawful carnal knowledge by members of the priesthood is punishable by death," he persists.

A noncommittal hum, and she squeezes three drops into his eye. "It would be, if there were a law to keep out here, but there isn't."

"I am the law."

"Okay, cowboy." She moves to his other eye. "You can add that to my list of offenses for which you'll need to arrest me as soon as you're not weak as an infant." She straightens and closes the bottle and sets it on the nightstand.

"I'm going to leave the water and glass here in case you need it." She draws the quilt over his legs and smooths the rough fabric. "I won't be far. My room is at the end of the hall. Call if you need to get up; I doubt your legs will hold you, and I doubt you want the familiar escorting you to the bathroom. It tends to get handsy."

He blinks owlishly at her from the bed as she gathers up his leathers and the empty bowl. She drapes the former over her arm. "I'll see to these for you." She wrinkles her nose at the rank odor of sweat and urine and the dry skitter of sand down her arm.

A vague nod. "You have my gratitude," he murmurs, and finally cedes the battle to the pull of slumber.

She watches the steady rise and fall of his chest for a long time, afraid that if she leaves him, it will cease and she will find him here in the morning, cold and waxy and stiff.

_Just like you lost Johannes that day in Sola Mira,_ her conscience reminds her. _You let him go without you and lost him forever. He slipped through your hands as much as Matthias', and you can't take that chance again._

She gazes at his face, slack and untroubled and deeply asleep, and can't shake the fear that it still lies in the shadow of death. She leaves the room long enough to put his leathers in the room she shares with Johannes and trade the empty bowl for a sleepy Anneliese who wants her mumm-mumm, and then she returns and sets a chair beside the bed and settles in to begin a long and lonely vigil.


	3. Neither Milk Nor Honey in This Land

The house is quiet when he returns, still in the rosy light of the coming dawn. His boots crunch and scrape on the hardpan as he crosses the small square of yard to the water pump. He licks a smear of drying blood from the corner of his mouth, bittersweet as cheap communion wine, and his stomach offers a mournful gurgle. His meal, such as it was, sloshes in his stomach, thin and unsatisfying, and he grimaces as he grabs the long, tarnished handle and begins to prime it. For a moment, there's nothing but the groan of ancient metal and the phlegmatic wheeze of air through rust-raddled pipes, and then water emerges in a dispirited freshet that he knows will taste of copper and rust, of blood from a dying heart.

_This place is dying, too,_ he thinks as he cups his hand beneath the tepid flow. _Has been since I got here, but it's worse now. The pump's going dry, and the bandits know to give this place a wide berth. They say the Devil roams this land, and the only ones desperate enough to come through these parts are so diseased they're inedible._ Another grimace at the memory of the sour tang of infection that had wafted from far too many of the possibilities that had presented themselves tonight, the yellow, high-fat stink of incipient fever and impending death. 

_Plague,_ his mind had whispered as he'd watched them scurry through the shadows like lice, unsuspecting of the sickness that lurked in their blood. For some, it had been subtle, no more than a hint of warning smoke upon the midnight air, but for others--far too many others for his comfort--it had been a solid wall of stench and decay that had made his eyes water. He had watched them pass in silence from his predatory crouch, and then he'd turned and left them to the shadow of death and sought for the relative safety of a failing outpost a few miles beyond his customary hunting grounds.

He splashes water on his mouth and scrubs his lips and chin, and then he fills his hand again and rinses his mouth of the taste of old woman and terror. Her blood had been tired and thin and dark with age, and he'd known even as he'd taken it that it wouldn't be enough, but it was all he had dared. The old woman had died noiselessly, her wizened, ossified windpipe crushed beneath the rapacious latch of his fangs, but unease had danced along his spine, nonetheless, and the air had thrummed with an inchoate sense of danger that had made the hairs rise at his nape. He'd fed as quickly as he could and left her where she lay, sunken mouth agape and gnarled hands clawed in the threadbare linen and the piquant, jungly reek of piss soaking into the lumpy mattress.

Home had been the only thought in his head. Home and Liese and the soft, soothing snuffle of his sleeping daughter in her crib. The companionable creak of the sagging porch steps underfoot and the familiar, homey ugliness of the living-room couch. The books in his library and the clutter of his desk and the rough nap of the quilt that tops their bed. The sweetness of hot chocolate and the acrid, birchbark aroma of hot coffee. Home.

_But for how much longer?_ he wonders darkly as he spits pink-tinged water into the sand and scrubs at his neck. Fear of the Devil might keep the diseased from his door, but it won't keep him fed, and while he has no doubt that he could ravage the anemic outpost and temporarily glut himself on its cowering inhabitants, to do so would no doubt attract attention and earn him a future of hastily-assembled posses tracking him through the wastes with aging weapons in their trembling hands and vengeance in their hearts. Days and weeks of evasion until they wearied of the hunt or he slaughtered them all. Bullets were of no consequence to him, but Liese was still mortal, and of little Anni he was unsure. She had his eyes and his teeth, and illness could establish no hold on her sturdy little body, but she had yet to be wounded, to be tested by bullet or blade or the kiss of flame, and he means to keep it that way.

If things don't improve, they will have to move, to pull up stakes and head deeper into the desert's loveless bosom. It is not a possibility he wishes to consider. It would mean leaving the inviolate security of the hive and tearing his family from the home has had made for them and driving them into an uncertain future, into a journey with no foreseeable end.

_Another day,_ he thinks, and releases the pump handle. The water sputters to a disconsolate stop, and a single drop hangs from the spout, a tear clinging to an outthrust lip. _I have other things to worry about tonight. Like the stranger I left alone with my family._ He shakes the water from his hand, wipes black flecks of tarnish from his palm on the dusty fabric of his jeans, and clatters up the porch steps.

Liese isn't curled on her customary spot on the couch when he enters, a book in her hand and a welcoming smile on her lips, nor is the familiar puttering in the kitchen. He scrapes his boots on the threshold in a futile bid to dislodge the sand in their soles and steps inside. One heartbeat, thready and slow, comes from the vicinity of the kitchen. The familiar, like as not, bedded down for the night in its nest just off the pantry. Three more from the back of the house. Alive, then, and accounted for.

He closes the door and locks it, and then he follows the timpani of sound. They're all but synchronized, oddly enough, though Anni's is a trifle faster, a tenacious, hummingbird flutter that never fails to fill him with a quiet, savage joy.

_My daughter. My little imp. The child I was never meant to have. To dream of you was to covet, a sin for which your unwitting grandfathers punished me with lash and privation and hours suspended in the cool isolation of a cell, the shackles sinking into my abraded flesh like the kiss of a brand. But dream of you I did, just as I dreamed of your mother--her touch, her kiss, the warm, inviting heat of her, the sweet, unhurried making of you. I carried the hope of you into the depths of Sola Mira and mourned its loss on that cold stone slab while the Queen's children nibbled me like a sweetmeat and I shivered in my own piss. I thought you lost when I awoke in that dark and loveless womb with nothing left to me but a body no longer my own and a hunger that devoured all reason, but you returned in time, reborn in that first glimpse of your mother's face as she knelt in the sand at my feet with tears on her face._

_I heard your heartbeat while you were still becoming inside your mother, the furious, defiant thunder of it hidden behind the rush of blood in your mother's veins and her own heartbeat, slow and steady and sublime. I would have heard it sooner--should have, my little imp, and for that, I apologize--but the Church fathers were poor teachers and had never taught us about the birds and the bees and what happened when the seed found willing soil, and so I mistook the portents of your arrival for the doom of your mother, for my failings as a husband with more love than knowledge of how to care for a woman. When she fainted, crumpled in the front yard like a broken doll, I saw only farewell, only a future of loneliness and what might have been._

_Once I heard you for the first time, I never stopped listening for you. I listened for you every day, from the time I woke to the time I slept, and I pressed my ear to your mother's belly every chance I got. It drove your mother crazy sometimes, but she never refused, never stopped me from seeking you out. She knew how much you meant to me, how long I had waited to hear you speak even before you had a mouth, and she simply huffed and smiled and held my head against the unapologetic swell of you beneath her robes. So clear and strong, you were, and I lost count of how many nights I spent on my knees in front of your mother or lying in the bed of your creation with my ear pressed to the steadily-rising dome of her belly._

_We had so many conversations, you and I, in those months when your mother devoted herself to the building of you, eating more than I ever imagined she could, and in the oddest of combinations, and choking down the mouthfuls of blood you needed to grow big and strong. She hated every swallow. To her, it wasn't a refreshing nectar, but a terrible gall, a penance for the love she had chosen, and sometimes she wept as her throat spasmed against against the copper and iron of ugly necessity. Sometimes she waddled to the bathroom as fast as she could and stood over the toilet, fighting the impulse to retch and expel the abomination I implored her to swallow for your sake. I never felt so much a monster, so unclean, as when I watched the light of my world cry with a rime of blood on her lips. There were times she couldn't bear to look at me, could not bring herself to forgive the monstrosity I asked of her, but she never gave in to the urge to retch and deny you the chance to thrive. She loved you as much as I did, longed for you just as fiercely, and nothing burns so brightly as a mother's devotion._

_And all was forgiven the moment you took your first breath, or at least forgotten. You were perfect, my little imp, a holy miracle, and your cries were music to my soul. Your mother forgive me, she in whom I place my trust and for whom I would reduce the world to ash, but your first cry was the sweetest moment I have ever known, and when your mother placed you in my arms and sagged against the pillows for a well-earned rest, I looked into your wrinkled little face and knew that I would tear my soul from its moorings to keep you safe._

_And every day, I still listen for the sound of you._

He follows the cherished sound to the guest room cum storage room and finds his brood in the rapidly-lightening darkness. Liese sits in a chair in the center of the room, chin on her chest and eyelids fluttering. His little imp is in her arms, snuggled against her exposed breast, and a saliva-slick binky lies in the dust beside the chair.

_They fell asleep watching our friend here,_ he muses as he listens to them breathe. _It seems he's roused her nursing instincts._

He turns to study the figure in the bed, tucked snugly beneath the patchwork quilt that had come with the house when he'd ended the impromptu housewarming party and consigned the former tenants to the compost heap out back. He looks younger in the milky, predawn light, more vulnerable, and Johannes' nostrils flare and twitch as they catch the heady aroma of his blood. Sweet as an ancient French bordeaux, and his mouth waters. It would be so easy to close the distance between them and bend to a feast. He's still weak as a kitten despite Liese's cosmetic improvements, and the rich liquid would satiate him for days, maybe a week. 

He licks his lips at the thought, and shifts his weight to his front foot. _I could make it quick. No need to make him suffer. Swift as a scalpel's kiss, and he'd never feel a thing, or maybe he'd slip into the hereafter on the wings of a sweet dream. If I did it right, Liese wouldn't hear a thing._

_Oh, but this isn't a meal to be rushed,_ murmurs the voice of temptation, soft and unctuous and sweet as frankincense on the morning air. _It's a meal to be savored, brother, every draught a gift. If you exercised a bit of discipline, it could last for days, maybe weeks. Just think of it: your private font of elixir. A treasure beyond price, and yours for the taking._

He stifles a whine, and his throat burns with the need to taste, for a single mouthful. He crosses to the bed with soundless strides, and his eyes gleam in the milky light, the pupils wide and dark with a savage lust. This close, the smell is ambrosial, and his cock twitches in his pants.

_Just a taste. A single sip. How long has it been since you've tasted anything so fine? Since Chin and your former brothers in New Absalom, when you tore the heart from his chest and held it aloft like a spoil of war? Years, it's been, and you still dream of it now and then, still remember how it fluttered in your palm, the spastic, arrhythmic death throes of an abandoned fledgling. How sweet it was on your tongue, pomegranate wine, and even after it had withered to jerky in the desert heat, each morsel was a sweetmeat on your tongue. It was the stuff of dreams, and the closest you've come since is the blood that spills from your Liese every month in a thick, intoxicating rivulet that sharpens your hunger even as your belly swears it can take no more._

The whine becomes a feral growl. and he bares his fangs. Why should he deprive himself of such a gift when it lies so helplessly before him? The people had had once served so blindly had certainly never spared themselves a single luxury, never foresworn a single desire of their shallow, avaricious hearts. While he had starved and shivered and ached with thirst, had longed for a single touch of Liese's hand, they had gobbled and guzzled and rutted in warm beds, and none of the lives he had saved with his faithful, foolish sacrifice had spared him a thought, had done without so much as a bite so that he might know a moment's comfort. He had been nothing but a shadow unnoticed, so why was he wasting another instant in pointless denial?

He bends over his quarry and sniffs, and oh, God, it's the perfume of heaven. He's hard as tempered iron inside his pants, and he absently palms himself through the fabric.

_Thank thee, oh, Lord, for the bounty we are about to receive, and gratitude for the many blessings you have shown us, your unworthy servants._

_Oh, dove, it's all right._ Liese, kneeling beside the tub with a washcloth in her hand and crooning reassurances to the unexpected charge he had dumped onto her sofa like a proud tom returning victoriously from the hunt.

He freezes, fangs poised to sink into the supple throat beneath them. One breath, then two, and then he slowly straightens and turns to study her. She's beautiful, his Liese, her hair kindling to golden fire in the early dawn light. Her face is slack with sleep, her pink lips parted to reveal a hint of white. Her bared breast rises and falls in time with her deep and even breathing, and her fingers curl and twitch beneath his daughter's plump little body, ever alert even as she slumbers. 

She is priceless, a madonna to rival the Church's empty-eyed idol, and what would she say if she opened her eyes to find him draining her pet project dry while he slept, defenseless and unknowing, unable to even cry out? What would she think? She has seen him kill in defense, has watched him tear his enemies limb from limb in the name of escape and self-preservation, but she has never seen him kill for the ugly sport of it, the pure, black joy of it. She has never seen him snap the spine of his supper with a well-placed stomp just to watch it writhe in the sand like a pinned insect, never seen him come in his pants as he fastened his fangs to the throat of his prey and listened to its screams fade into glottal, wet gurglings. What would she think if she saw him as he truly was, as the Queen had remade him? Would she love him still, or would she turn from him in disgust, repudiate her love for him, and fly from him to sanctuary of her apostate brethren who roamed the wastes in search of vampires?

What would she think if she woke to find all her work undone, her ward stiff and cold and bloodless in his bed? Would she think him carried away by weakness and fever, the inevitable outcome of a battle lost long before he dragged him through their door? Would she blame herself for not doing enough, for not coaxing the miracle of Lazarus from hands from which too much has already been expected? Or would she know the truth and hate him for it?

It's not a chance he's willing to take, and so he reluctantly turns from his prize, Tantalus thwarted, and crouches in front of her chair. "Liese," he calls softly, and reaches out to stroke her cheek. 

She awakens with a start and nearly sends Anni tumbling to the floor. "Hmm? Oh." A sleepy, besotted smile that makes his heart swell with unspeakable love. "You're back. Good hunting?" She shifts the baby in her arms and winces at a crick in her neck.

"Good enough," he answers, and ignores the indignant pang from his shortchanged stomach. "What are you doing in here?"

She offers him a rueful smile and looks over his shoulder at the occupant of the bed behind him. "Didn't want to leave him, I guess. I was afraid he'd need more water or vomit in his sleep and choke on it."

"Well, he didn't. He's sleeping like a baby. Let's get you to bed. A chair is no place for a queen to sleep, and Anni needs her blankies."

She hesitates. "But what if he gets sick in the night?"

_Then you won't be the only one disappointed._ He takes shallow breaths to blunt the sweet spice of forbidden fruit and reaches for his daughter. "I doubt he will if he hasn't by now, but if he's not unconscious, he should be able to roll over."

Anni stirs at the sudden absence of maternal warmth, and sleepy, amber eyes blink up at him.

"Hey, pumpkin," he croons. "Daddy didn't mean to wake you."

A dozy smile at the sound of his voice, and a chubby hand reaches up to touch his lips. A tiny finger prods his fang.

"You like those? Someday, yours will be just as big." He presses a kiss to a soft, pink palm and tucks her against him. "Time to go sleepy, my girl."

There's no protest from Anni, who promptly jams her thumb into her mouth and lets her head sag against his shoulder, but her mother is another matter. She lingers, her gaze fixed on the guest she has so staunchly tended.

"Liese," he coaxes. "Let's go. He'll sleep whether you're here or not."

A hand absently drifts up to adjust her robe and cover her breast, but she makes no move to rise. "But what if-?" Her eyes are bleak and fretful, and he can hear the echo of an old guilt never pardoned. _What if he dies because I wasn't here, because I looked away for that single, fatal moment?_ The quiet, despairing rasp of flesh slipping through flesh and the somber crunch and scrape of scree underfoot. The keen awareness of a number reduced by one.

"I am right here, my Liese. Right here. And he will be, too. You've done all you can. Now it's up to him." He shifts the baby to the crook of his right arm and extends his opposite hand. "Come, my Liese. Come to bed?"

A last look to satisfy herself that the stranger hasn't gone to his eternal reward while she snored into her robes, and then she gives a small nod and stands. Her hands brush the folds from the thin, grey fabric. "All right. You want me to take her?" She reaches for the baby.

"I've got her. It's my first chance to hold her all day." He nods at the binky on the floor. "Grab her binky?"

"Grt," Anni declares with sleepy vehemence.

"That's right," he replies chummily. "Bed is great."

Liese scoops the binky from the floor and rubs it on the front of her robes. She shuffles to the door with the furtive, peevish hiss of bare feet on old wood, and there she waits, hand resting on the old, brass knob. Her gaze shifts to the bed again.

"He'll be fine," he says firmly. "Bed."

He herds his little family down the hall to the bedroom, grateful to escape the torment of that heady aroma. Liese is a slumped, shambling specter in front of him, and Anneliese is a soft, comforting weight in his arms. He smooths the down of her dark curls and presses a kiss to her temple. _Oh, my little imp, how I've missed you._

"Pat," she says drowsily. As far as he can tell, it's her fatigue-fogged attempt at either _Papa_ or _Vati_. Either way, it warms his heart.

"I am. And I love you."

He relaxes the moment the bedroom door closes behind them and the delicious smell from down the hall is swamped by the familiar smells of home. The scent of him and Liese on the bedclothes, cardamom and rose, and of Anni on the floor, cornstarch and breast milk and the borax of her linen diapers.

He carries her to her crib, a dark, wooden counterpart to the cradle in the storage room cum sickbed. It's short and squat and plain, the work of a stubby-fingered yeoman, and he's wondered from time to time if it was made by the leathery, callused hands of the man whose throat he'd torn out the day he'd moved in. How strong they'd been for a human, iron and stone beneath thick skin as they'd clawed and scrabbled for survival. It had taken them a long time to go slack, to surrender a fight whose outcome was never in doubt.

He supposes he owes that nameless man a debt of gratitude. This crib has held his daughter since the day she was born, tiny and pink and helpless in the folds of her receiving blanket. It's her first sanctuary in this hard and terrible ruin of the world, and though he doubts she will remember it as she grows, he will never forget it.

_Especially not if there's another child to call it home soon._

He checks her diaper for any last-minute deposits, and when his eyes don't water and his fingers come away dry, he settles her among the nest of blankets. "There we are. Nice and cozy." He hands her her favorite sockmonkey. "There's Monkey."

She grins up at him and jams her thumb into her mouth.

"We're going to have to break you of that habit someday, you know," he says, but he doesn't have the heart for it. "I love you."

She kicks her feet and gurgles at him, and then she rolls onto her side, and just like that, she's out, a candle snuffed betwixt pinching fingers. He shakes his head in silent wonder at the speed with which she passes from here to the land of Nod, and he smooths a hand over her side in wordless goodnight. She's warm and vital beneath his reverent hand, and the wonder intensifies, mixed with a fierce pride.

_I made her._ We _made her._

He turns to look at Liese and is surprised to find her watching him from the edge of their bed, a fond smile on her lips. "What?" he asks warily.

"Nothing," she says, and flashes him the mischievous grin that has earned their daughter her nickname. "It's just funny to see you with her. You go all soft and gooey."

"Gooey?" he repeats incredulously, and shrugs out of his duster, which he tosses onto the nearest chair.

"Mmmhmm."

"And I'll show you soft," he growls. He rounds the bed in four strides and sweeps her into his arms. She smells of dust and toil and too much care, and he buries his face in her neck. _You should smell of roses. This is no life for you. You deserve better._ He closes his eyes and mouths the ivory stem of her neck.

"Hello, husband of my heart," she purrs, and arches to grant him greater access. "Have you missed me so?" Her hand cradles his nape.

"Always. Always, my Liese." He sighs at her fingers in his hair.

"Even after all this time? Even after I've...changed?"

He pulls back, surprised by the question and its uncharacteristic timidity. "Changed?" He brushes a golden strand from her temple. "You are still my Liese, she who holds my heart in her hand."

"But my body is different now, since..." Her gaze drifts to the crib and the sleeping hump of Anni beneath her blanket.

"Your body," he murmurs, and leans forward to nip her bottom lip, "is a surpassing wonder of a rotting god's dying creation." He tugs at the hem of her robes and rucks them above her hips. "It's been the stuff of my yearnings since my first fever dream." He caresses the spar of her hip and delights in her breathless shudder. "And it's only grown more beautiful."

"But it's changed. My hips are not so slim, and there are marks-"

He stops her protests with a kiss. "Your hips are perfect. Those hips brought my daughter into the world whole and sound, gave me everything I ever wanted. As for those marks, well, those are the marks of a warrior, and they deserve nothing but worship."

"Flatterer," she says, but her eyes sparkle, and her hands set to work on the buttons of his shirt.

"Hardly. I'm just an honest man." He pulls her robe over her head and exults at having her naked and willing before him. A goddess in the flesh, and he traces the ridge of her collarbone with adoring fingers. "Nearer my god to thee," he murmurs, and the familiar desire blossoms in the pit of his belly, dark and leviathan and blasphemous in its intensity. His cock pulses inside his jeans, and even his blood hunger fades into momentary insignificance.

"Oh, I'll get you even closer than that." A belladonna promise, and she slides to her knees in front of him with the obscene, serpentine grace of the damned. She smiles up at him as she unbuttons his jeans and lowers the zipper, and he moans when her tongue darts out to moisten lips gone rosy and plump with desire.

He knows what's coming, and yet he still cries out when the wet heat of her mouth engulfs him. This is a sacrament, the holiest he knows, and his hips surge blindly into the unrepentant sanctuary of her. Her name is a hosanna on his lips, ragged and guttural and sacred on his tongue, and when he pulls her from her knees and begins his worship in earnest, it is her name he calls when the world falls away to reveal the face of God.

 

It's her voice that recalls him to awareness, and her lips, warm velvet on his shoulder. "-All right, my love?" Muted, as though rising from the depths of a well, and he blinks down at her.

"Mmm?" He's still in his mount, still inside her, and he rolls his hips to cement his claim and keep his seed inside her for as long as possible.

A hiss. "Easy, tiger."

His brows knit in confusion and burgeoning worry. Had he hurt her in the atavistic throes of his climax, thrust too deeply or too hard? He shifts and tries to peer between their sweat-slicked bodies for signs of injury--a deepening bruise or a flash of crimson.

"I'm fine," she soothes. "Just oversensitive."

He bends to mouth a bead of sweat from her clavicle. "Forgive me."

Her fingers glide over his spine in a dreamy caress. "Nothing to forgive, sweetheart."

"Good, because I'm not that sorry."

She snorts. "Of course you're not."

A sly smile. Then, "Are you sure you're all right?" All earnest solicitude.

"I'm fine."

He slips out of her and stretches out beside her, head pillowed on her shoulder and arm draped across her still-heaving belly. She's beautiful and debauched and wreathed in sweat, and his seed glistens between her folds and on her thighs. The sight fills him with pride, and it's all he can do not to throw back his head and roar his defiance to the heavens, a conquering lion enjoying the fruits of his pride.

"You're looking awfully pleased with yourself," she teases.

"Shouldn't I be? By all appearances, I've just thoroughly satisfied my wife."

"And yourself, by the looks of you."

"Mmm. That was your doing."

He nuzzles the nautilus of her ear. "Are you happy here? Do I make you happy?"

"Blissfully." She rolls to face him. "What brought this on?" She draws her hand over the swell of his ass.

He rumbles happily at the touch and presses into it. He has never tired of this, never taken it for granted. It's an act as sacred as the one that preceded it, a song of Solomon etched into his flesh by her slowly-roaming hands, a whispered _I love you_ that threads itself into his sinews. He pulls her closer and buries his face in the crook of her neck, inhales the scent of her, sweat and sex and warm desert sand.

"Hey, you," she murmurs, and slides her fingers through his hair, toys with the damp strands. "What is it? What have I done to make you think I'm unhappy?"

He looks up at her, heavy-lidded and adoring. "Nothing. But this is not the life I envisioned for you."

She furrows her brow. "No? I seem to recall that you couldn't wait to have me all to yourself in some isolated little cabin." She throws a leg over his hip and draws him closer, and his quiescent prick grazes the coarse thatch of her pubic hair. He shudders at the unalloyed intimacy of it and seeks out her lips for a lazy kiss.

"I did, he agrees. "But my fantasies didn't exactly feature a desert without another living soul for one hundred miles."

"I seem to remember a river. And fish."

_And a tree. The big oak in front of my parents' cabin. I wanted to dance with you there, and love you, to brush the leaves from your hair after we made love in its shade. I wanted to brush the wedding rice from it after we took our vows beneath its boughs, and to watch your belly swell beneath its canopy. I wanted to watch Anni play in its leaves, watch her shriek with joy as she clutched them in her chubby fists and tried to cram them into her mouth. But there is no tree, no river, no fish cooked over the fire in the front yard while the smoke spirals to the stars and the fireflies blink in the grass and mingle with the embers. Just miles and miles of hardpan and roses rare as God's grace._

"You remember."

"Of course. I treasured your every word, all the more since we had to snatch them like thieves in the night."

"Well, the only thing I've managed to bring you is a cabin," he says, and bitterness prickles and sours on his tongue.

"And a lovely wedding, and a child," she counters stoutly. She raises her head from the pillow. "It's everything I wanted and all that you promised, even if it wasn't packed exactly as you imagined." Her expression softens. "Johannes. My love. What is this about? Has our visitor really upset you so much?"

"No," he replies gruffly. It's not a lie, but neither is it a certainty. Their visitor _has_ upset him, though he cannot say why. He's no threat to him; even if he weren't currently weak as a puling kitten, it would be a matter of a thought and a twist of his hand to send him to the hereafter, but his presence unsettles him all the same.

_Maybe it's because he exposes how vulnerable you are out here, how desolate. You are immortal, as heedless of time as the bedrock of the earth, but Liese is not. She is yet a mortal goddess, still prey to illness or malice or unlucky circumstance. The bullet that to you is a trifling inconvenience soon mended could splatter her brains across the sand to sizzle on the hardpan. The plague that festers in the humans' blood could tear her from you in a matter of days and leave you to mourn for a loveless eternity. A broken bone or ruptured appendix could forever maim her or damn her to an agonizing death while poisons rot her from the inside. There isn't a doctor for two hundred miles since you snapped that fat bastard's neck for trying to murder Anni while she slept in her mother's womb. No midwife, either. If you're successful in your rut, there'll be no one to help when her time comes. The last one was hard enough. If the labor goes wrong or she gets childbed fever..._

He thinks of the settlers he saw shuffling across the desert, heads bent and eyes glassy and the stink of disease seeping through their filthy pores. How long until one of them finds their way to his door, swaying and delirious, an animal looking for a quiet place to die? How long before Liese, in an act of mercy, opens the door and unwittingly lets the end inside?

_Oh, dove, it's all right._ Liese on her knees beside the tub, tending to the stranger like the good Samaritan. Liese has not lost her kindness, her hope for the world, and it would be the death of her.

"No," he repeats. "But my hunts are taking longer, and I hate leaving you alone so long." He thinks of the familiar, fleshless hip snapping between her limp thighs.

"I was trained in the art of self-defense, you know," she reminds him drily. "Just as you were. I even bested you a time or two."

"That was a long time ago," he points out. "And it's been a while since you trained that hard."

"Because you told me I had nothing more to fear." It's sharp, almost a snap, and her eyes darken with hurt. "Besides, I've been a little busy with other things." She slips her leg from around his hip and rolls away from him.

_You fool,_ he berates himself. "Liese... It's not meant as rebuke. It's only the truth."

She is not mollified. In fact, she sits up and reaches for her crumpled robes.

"Where are you going?"

"To the bathroom," comes the short reply. "I think my frail constitution can still manage that." In the faint light of dawn, the spidery lines of her childhood penance spread across her back, wattled and white, as though her bones have pushed through her skin, and in his mind's eye, he sees the tatters of her robes, the bob and sway of her breast with every cruel lash. His nostrils prickle with the scent of copper and iron and flaking rust.

He scrabbles across the bed and curls a hand around her hip. "Don't go. Forgive me. Please."

She does not turn, and no answer comes, but her hand rests atop his own. "I still have to pee. You don't want me getting an infection. It's like pissing fire, and it'll put your little project on indefinite hold."

He relaxes his hold, but he can't bring himself to let go. He's terrified that he's said something irrevocable, offered an insult greater than any to pass the lips of the Fathers. "I love you, Liese. _Verzeih mir._ "

"Still have to pee."

He drops his hand to the coverlet, and she rises like a wisp of smoke and leaves only her warmth behind. He watches the sway of her ass as she crosses to the door and lets her robes slip from her fingers to pool at the threshold. A turn of the knob, and she is gone, and a rabbity voice in his head whispers that it's forever, that pride has carried her out the door and beyond his entreaties.

_You fool. You stupid fool._

Minutes pass, and there is only the silence, forlorn and foreboding. _Gone! She's gone!_ his grief-stricken mind cries, but then comes the phlegmatic wheeze of the flushing toilet and her tread upon the floor. The creak of an opening door, but not this one. His heart stutters inside his chest, and he sits up in preparation for desperate, naked pursuit. The door closes, and her footsteps sound outside their door. The dancing shadow of her feet flashes beneath, and then the door swings open to reveal her in her glory, Godiva dismounted, blonde hair and pale flesh and high breasts with nipples peaked by the cool morning air. Hips broadened by the gift of life and a warrior's long, toned legs.

"Johannes," she says when she crawls into bed beside him. "Look at you. You've gotten yourself into a lather. I just went to the bathroom."

"I can't lose you. You are my garden of Eden. If I lost you-" His throat works.

She coaxes him onto the pillows. "You're talking nonsense, my love. The only place I'm going is to sleep." She opens her arms.

He curls into their familiar shelter and molds himself to her. "Forgive me."

"There's nothing to forgive. You just pricked my vanity. There's no denying I'm not what I was."

"You're so much better."

"Ha. There's the charm." She smooths his hair. "Does the Judge truly bother you so much?"

He thinks of Liese, shivering in the grips of childbed fever, burning to death while she screams of a cold so deep it inspires madness. Of roaming settlers with contagion in their blood and enough strength to stagger to their door. Of scheming familiars with lust in their hearts, and of Anni, who has never met a stranger.

_Oh, dove, it's all right._

"No. Everything is fine," he says, and wonders if she hears the lie in it.

_There are no fish,_ he thinks. _And the tree is dead._

It's a long time before he sleeps, and when he does, he dreams of blood that coats his tongue like ash, and of carrion crows who become plague men who stride across the sand. And of shadows that spill across the land in a never-ending tide.


	4. A Place at the Table

For a moment, it's all a blank. No past, no present, just a vast, white nothingness in which he can find nothing of himself. He gropes for something, anything, with which to ground himself--his name, his age, a quicksilver flash of childhood memory, but all that comes to him is the unfamiliar softness beneath him and the sudden realization that he is naked. He stretches beneath cool cotton sheets and a swaddling heaviness around his legs.

_Dredd,_ he thinks. _My name is Dredd._

The rest follows in its train. The remembered heft of a helmet. The thrum of a Lawmaster between his thighs, a lascivious throb against the leather of his pants. The weight of his Lawgiver on his hip. The seething pulse of the city, and the sour tang of grit on his tongue.

_Except I'm not in the city anymore. Haven't been for a while._ He snatches at the memory, tugs it from the void with eager fingers and turns it in his hands. Cracked hardpan and parched earth and wood gone brittle with age. Sweat stinging his eyes and prickling his scalp and the blood of the lawless dried to a brown stipple on his visor and mingled with the dust of an oncoming dust storm. His tongue dry and swollen behind cracked, blackening lips and a thirst pooled deep in the pit of his belly, Asmodeus' handmaiden crouched in the darkness and beckoning him to sin.

_I was on the Long Walk, the Law in the lawless land._ The scuff and scrape of his boots over the lifeless, dun earth. The gradual tightening of his skin as it had dried for want of water and the sibilant whispers in his ears that urged him to stop, to rest, to lie down just for a little while. The tantalizing, shimmering glimpses of water that never was, that turned to dust on his lapping tongue as he knelt on the baking earth with his ass in the air and the sun broiling his back inside his leather jacket. The stupid, distant yearning for his Lawmaster and its tireless solidity. That last night, airless and stifling and full of ghosts as he lurched across the indifferent expanse. The dim, muddy wetness of too-thick piss on his thighs and the animal grunts torn from his throat as his body had slipped beyond his control and his mind had stretched toward oblivion with pathetic relief, fingers clawing and crabbing in the thin sand and his hips jerking in a copulatory buck that had been perversely pleasurable in the dim, feral recesses of his fading brain. 

He swallows and is surprised to find spittle in his mouth and no sandpaper scour in his throat. Sweeter memories now. The cool caress of water against his parched flesh and the glorious, erotic sluice of it over his peeling lips and fissured, distended tongue. A soft, reassuring voice in his ear, so unlike the stentorian, bloodless voices of the Church Fathers and the vulgar, growling mutterings of the perps he pursues every day. A flicker of blonde hair and the murmur of endearments he can't quite recall.

_Anderson,_ he thinks, but that isn't right. Anderson had never called him anything but "Judge" or "sir", and besides, she had turned from him on the morning he'd taken the first steps of his Long Walk. She's still in the city, walking its squalid streets with the law on her lips and the incontrovertible authority of the Lawgiver on her hip.

A persistent, muted thump draws him from his jumbled thoughts, and he opens his eyes. _Thump thump,_ and he realizes it's coming from the door. He rolls onto his side, alarmed at how much effort such a simple movement takes, and scans his surroundings for potential weapons. A pitcher on the nightstand offers itself, but it's only good for one blow, and if it doesn't stop the hostile, he won't get a second chance. The heavier brass chamberpot has more potential, but it's also further away, and given his present state of weakness, he can't trust himself to launch an effective defense. He's as vulnerable as an infant, and unless his Lawgiver miraculously drops from the heavens, he can only hope for the mercy of a quick death.

Another thump, and the door rattles in its frame. An impatient shuffle and a shrill, disgruntled caw, and the door rattles again.

_It's too low to be a person. A dog, maybe._ More shuffling and another odd, fluting caw. 

_No dog sounds like that,_ notes the cold, analytical voice of the Judge. 

_That's a big damn cat,_ he notes wryly, and resigns himself to what truths may come.

Another dogged thump, and the door surrenders to the assault and swings open to reveal neither a dog nor a monstrous cat, but a tiny little girl, who toddles into the room with a crow of triumph and holds aloft a miniature gladius, Lady Justice come victorious.

_Not a gladius,_ he amends as his eyes adjust to the gloaming shadows of twilight. _Half a banana._

The small interloper lumbers forward on chubby bare feet and comes to a stop in the middle of the room, where she sways and grins and surveys him with eyes like summer honey.

_I've seen those eyes before, only they were looking down at me._ He eyes her in wary silence, but she only crows at him and lowers her banana and wraps both hands around it in order to take a wobbly bite. 

"Vat!" she declares after a contemplative chew, and holds it out, an opponent offering up her blade. When he doesn't react, she draws nearer in an insistent wobble and nearly faceplants into the side of the bed. She shoots out a banana-smeared hand to steady herself and renews her offer. "Nan!" she says imperiously, and jabs the banana at his mouth.

He's so hungry that it's almost tempting despite the drool and the gnaw marks. "No," he says absurdly. Then, more absurdly still, "Thank you."

Indignant at this rebuff to her hospitality, she furrows her brow and renews her generous offer. "Nan!" she repeats as though she were a doctor explaining treatment to a particularly recalcitrant patient.

He recoils from the insistent advance of saliva-slick banana. "No."

That earns him an aggrieved bark, and she tugs on the sheet. She plops the banana onto his chest and seizes the sheet in her other hand. A determined grunt, and then she releases a guttural war cry. "NanananaNA!"

The sound, it seems, summons the cavalry, because there are hurried footsteps in the corridor. Soft light floods the doorway, followed by the silhouette of a woman and the faint gleam of blonde hair.

"What in the world?" demands a voice, bewildered and familiar.

_It's her,_ he realizes. _The voice I heard._

A soft clank as she sets a kerosene lantern on a hook just inside the door, and then she sweeps forward in a billow of grey cassock to capture his tormentor. "Leave our guest alone," she chides gently, and grimaces at the sight of the mauled banana lying on the coverlet. "How did you even get in here? I'm sure I closed that door."

"You did," he says in a dry rasp. "She battered it open."

She sighs. "Of course you did. You're as stubborn as your father." She presses a fond kiss into the crown of downy, brown curls.

"Says the most stubborn woman I have ever known," comes a laconic drawl from down the corridor. Footsteps thump in the hallway, a heavy tread with a soft, sibilant shuffle, and they carry a second shadow into view. A man this time, tall and broad-shouldered and lithe as he leans against the doorframe with his hip cocked at a jaunty angle and his thumbs thrust through the beltloops of his jeans. The light of the lantern is too uncertain and flickering to see him clearly, but what he does see makes his heart race and his mouth go dry.

Eyes like summer honey.

_If he steps forward, he'll look just like me,_ he thinks feverishly, and instinctively tenses beneath the blankets. _He's the man with my face. I'm not crazy._ He's not sure if it's a relief or a fresh terror.

_Or maybe you are,_ supplies a helpful, pragmatic voice inside his head. _Maybe the heat and privation and loneliness broke your mind and you've forsaken your senses just as you forsook the city. Maybe you're still wandering the wastes, stripped of your clothes and your reason and shoveling sand in your mouth as you weave across the expanse and invent a sanctuary that doesn't exist. Or maybe you were found by a fellow traveler and carted home to his humble abode, but there are no doppelgangers with yellow eyes or women with soft, sweet voices and golden hair or tiny warriors with gummed bananas held out in offering and the strength to open doors. Maybe you're just lying in the dark and dusty sickroom and conjuring phantoms while they offer what prayers they can and wait for you to die so they can scavenge what they can and leave your body for the buzzards and the starving coyotes sent to do the Lord's most unpleasant and thankless work._

_I didn't forsake the city,_ he protests. _I accepted my final duty. And that banana smells real enough._ He closes his eyes and opens them again. The man is still there. In fact, he slips into the room with a sinuous, feline swagger that speaks of grace and power and the confidence of an apex predator. Those yellow eyes gaze down at him, remote and assessing and mesmerizing, and then his lips curve into a devilish grin that exposes a pair of fangs.

"Hello, friend," he says in that low, dark voice, smoke and shadow and the lascivious caress of a velvet-gloved hand. "I don't believe we were properly introduced last night." He cocks his head. "Then again, you were indisposed." Those yellow eyes search his face, the lambent heat of a failing flame, and he wonders if he's as unsettled by their resemblance as he is.

_Or maybe he's just looking for the perfect spot to sink those fangs,_ mutters the dry, cynical voice of self-preservation, and he is hardly reassured when his tongue darts out to moisten his lips. He's keenly aware of his heartbeat inside his bare chest and the uneasy flutter of his pulse in his equally-naked throat, and he wishes for even the paltry protection of his leather jacket.

The grin widens as if he can read the thought.

"Johannes, stop looming," says his benefactor from last night. "Help me with our little welcoming committee." She tightens her grip on the baby, who squirms and grizzles and reaches for her now-purloined banana with a squawk of indignation. "She battered the door down, you know."

"She did?" The predatory grin transforms into a beam of paternal pride, and he turns to face his vigorously-protesting offspring. "That's my girl." He plucks her from her mother's arms and glances at the door. "It still looks upright to me." He strokes her hair.

"The point is, she got it open with nothing but her little fists and her unbreakable will."

"What did I tell you? She's just like her mother." He shifts the baby in his arms. "Why are you raising such a fuss?" he asks her when she looses a particularly fierce bellow and stretches toward the bed so far that he has to steady her. He follows the trajectory of her grasping fingers, and he steps back with a moue of distaste. "You don't want that. You don't know where it's been."

"In your daughter's mouth, like as not," the woman says. "She was probably trying to feed him."

"See? A generous spirit, just like her mother." He offers her a sly grin. "And who says I was talking about the banana?"

"Johannes!" Scandalized and fond.

"Either way, my point stands," he says serenely.

When the return of her prize is not forthcoming, the baby looses a guttural bellow of outrage.

"All this for a dirty banana," her father says, and gives her a soft bounce. "There's more where that came from."

"She gets the melodrama from her father."

"She does not," the father in question protests with a wounded scowl, and she laughs at the unassailable proof of her point.

"She does, and I love you both for it."

Mollified, he tightens his grip on the baby, who is doing her level best to slither free and reclaim her banana. "Come, my little imp. Let's get you cleaned up. I think you've bathed in that banana more than you've eaten it."

"Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!" she shrieks, and Dredd recoils from the unexpected might of her lungs.

His double's eyes narrow at the force of the auditory assault. "Enough!" he snaps with quiet finality, and the baby blinks, shocked into silence. He continues more gently. "That's enough, my little imp. Let's get cleaned up, and we'll get you another nan."

"Nan?" she chirps, and fixes her father with an unblinking, avian gaze, head cocked.

"Yes, nan. But first, we get cleaned up."

"You might as well wait until after breakfast," the woman says. "Else you'll just be changing her again."

"You're right. She'll probably try to shampoo with the oatmeal. Still, if I don't wash these little hands, we're likely to find banana all over the house."

"And the ants it attracts." She shudders, and her hand drifts to her forearm to brush away an unseen pest.

"No ants," he assures her, and turns his attention to the baby. "No ants because _we_ are going to get handsome and presentable for Mama."

The baby crows in emphatic agreement and pounds her fists on his bare shoulders.

"See? It's a unanimous decision." He bounces on his toes and offers her a jaunty grin.

"You're always handsome to me," she replies, and Dredd is surprised to find how much he agrees with the sentiment. He's mortified at the unsettled, restless heat between his legs and the restive twitch of his cock beneath the blankets, and he's grateful for the concealment they offer.

_Never figured you for a narcissist, Dredd,_ Hershey notes with wry amusement.

_It's just a side effect of my withdrawal from libido suppressants,_ he grouses as his cock gives another needy twitch at the subtle ripple of muscle beneath bare skin as the vampire spins on his heel and saunters toward the door.

She raises a finely-sculpted eyebrow. _Sure. You've been off those puppies for weeks. Any withdrawal symptoms should have subsided by now. You ask me, I'd say you just found something you like._

_Your analysis is biased. My body also reacted to the proximity of the woman last night. It's nothing but an autonomic reaction to stimuli._

_Mmmhm. Who says you don't like both?_ She offers him a knowing smile and rocks her office chair from side to side. _You wouldn't be the first, you know. Vows or not, Judges are only human. Even you._ Her voice softens at this last, and he's surprised to see sympathy in her dark brown eyes.

He says nothing. His interest in or desire for either is irrelevant; he is the law, even here in the forsaken wastes, and even if he could turn from his vows, leave them behind with his badge in the vaults of the Justice Department, it's plain that these two are promised to one another. To lust for either would be sin enough, but to covet another soul's light would be unforgivable. He breathes through his nose and calls up a meditative liturgy and prays for this useless temptation to release its grip.

The woman watches until her family disappears through the door, their voices raised in an exultant roar, and then she turns to him. "I'm sorry about that," she says. "We don't get many guests, and I guess she was curious. Especially since you-" She shrugs.

_Look just like her father?_ he finishes for her. He racks his muddled brain for her name. He senses he should know it, but nothing comes, and in the end, he says, "You were the one who took care of me?"

"She nods. "Yes. Liese. Your little visitor is Anni, and her doting father is Johannes."

_Liese._ Yes. The memory of the name, patiently murmured while deft hands drew a wet cloth over his dry, cracked skin, rises to the surface of his mind. "You're the apostate priestess."

"There's no need to sound so dour about it, but yes," she answers drily. "So you remember, then?" She gathers the folds of her robes in her hand and perches on the edge of the bed, careful not to jostle him.

"Fragments," he grunts. The flash of her hair. The delicious skim of her thin robe against his bare flesh. The faint recollection of cool fingers on his foreskin. His cock jumps and stiffens at the hazy memory, and it takes all his long years of discipline as a Judge not to fidget beneath the bedclothes.

"How do you feel? Any pain?"

_Never confess weakness,_ hisses the voice of his Judge's training, cold and thin inside his head. _Any weakness you display can be used against you by a suspect. A weak Judge does not survive._

She has shown no sign of hostility so far, and the presence of her infant makes it unlikely that she would attack, but thirty-five years of training and inveterate suspicion are not easily discarded, and so he settles for, "No pain." It seems inadequate, and so he adds, "I'm hungry."

"Well, that's to be expected. And a good sign." She pats his quilt-swaddled foot. "I'm sure breakfast will be ready in a few minutes."

"I have to use the bathroom," he says diffidently.

"Another good sign. It's just across the hall to the left." She considers. Do you think you can make it?"

_Don't show your weakness,_ warns the voice of the Judge, and the muscles of his jaw twitch with the dubious affirmative, but she is a priestess as much as he is a Judge, and she sees the truth long before his mouth can give form to the lie. "It's all right if you can't, sweetness. One of us can help you, or you can use this." She points at the chamberpot he had so lately considered using as a weapon against the unknown beast without his door. "It's not the most dignified, I suppose, but it'll do until you're feeling well enough to make it down the hall."

_Sweetness._ So he hadn't imagined that, either. The endearment prickles against his touch-starved flesh. It's a dangerous familiarity he cannot allow. He stiffens. "Dredd." The dull thud of a hurling stone dropped onto damp, cold earth.

"Dredd?" she repeats blankly.

"My name is Dredd."

The briefest of hesitations is the only betrayal. No gleam of sudden knowledge in her eye, no subtle flinch, no sharpening of her smile. Just the merest moment of stillness, so fleeting and illusory that he would doubt it were he not trained from first awareness to look for it, and a small part of him admires her discipline.

_Probably the same part that moved you to pass Anderson despite multiple and egregious violations,_ murmurs the cold, dry voice of Monsignor Orelas as he gazes down at him from his wooden throne with hard, grey eyes. _Which, might I remind you, is why you are here._

Liese stoops to retrieve the chamberpot and holds it out. "If you've a mind. Or would you prefer help?"

"No," he answers gruffly. The thought of her seeing him as God made him inspires a feverish dread. His cock gives another iniquitous twitch beneath the quilt. "I need clothes." He takes the chamberpot from her and rests it on the mattress.

"Yes, I suppose you do. Your leathers are here, but they need a clean. Until then, I'll see what I can find. Perhaps Johannes will remember his charity, though he does get precious about his jeans. Considers himself a bit of a fashion plate." She sighs. "We'll figure something out. If priests are good for nothing else, we can improvise. I'll be back in a bit with some clothes and another round of drops for your eyes, and then we can see about breakfast. Do you take coffee?"

His tongue cramps with longing at the mere mention. "Yes."

She bobs her head. "Coffee it is, then." She rocks back on her heels and sways back and forth, her hands meeting in a soft, rhythmic clap. The silence stretches between them until she says, "I'll leave you to it. Call if you need me." When his only response is a brusque nod, she returns it with a dip of her chin and lets her gaze sweep over him in a final check for hidden injuries or suppressed pain, and then she says firmly, "No heroics, please. Call me if you need anything."

He'd see himself planted beneath the sand before he let her see the embarrassing hardon he's been sporting since she and Johannes put in their appearance, but even he, steeped as he is in the unsentimental ways of frankness and dispassionate brute force, knows that to say so would be to invite further scrutiny, and so he settles for a terse grunt.

She raises an eyebrow in an unwitting imitation of Judge Hershey so perfect that he blinks. "Not much of a talker, are you?" she notes with a wry twist of lip. "Suit yourself. I'll be back in a few minutes or whenever I hear the thump of male ego deflated." She turns and lifts the lantern from the nail beside the door and takes the scant light with her, and he's left with the deepening darkness and the suspicion that he's proven a disappointment.

_Making friends wherever you go,_ Hershey sighs, and shakes her head.

_The law can abide no bias,_ he thinks, but it's cold comfort when he's fumbling with himself in the dark and willing his erection to subside enough for him to empty his revivified and protesting bladder into the waiting depths of age-pocked brass.

 

It's a test of wills she finds when she enters their bedroom, and she isn't sure who's getting the better of it. "Stop wiggling, you," Johannes says plaintively, a small shift bunched in both hands and his daughter clamped and wriggling between his knees. "You just had one of these on. The only difference is that this one is clean."

"Naaaaaaaaaaaan!" Anni screams, and thrashes between the vise of his knees. Nan! Nan! Naaaaaaan!" 

"We're going to get your nan, but we have to get dressed first. You can't go to breakfast naked."

"Naaaaaaaaaan!" she howls, and bucks furiously. Bare feet scrabble for purchase on the cuffs of his jeans, and she presses on his thighs with her small palms, as though trying to heave herself from the sucking depths of a hole.

"All this fuss," she says mildly. "I suppose you're going to lay this at my feet, too?"

He eyes her with the watchful wariness of a cornered coyote. "You were stubborn as a mule. I didn't make that up. Or did I hallucinate all those times an eight-year-old girl told the Church Fathers to fuck themselves?" He tries to slip the shift over Anni's head, but she evades it with surprising dexterity, throws back her head, and screeches until her face is an alarming puce.

"I never used any such language," she says loftily, and crosses the room to join the battle. "Anni, shhhh. The sooner you do this, the sooner you eat." She places a buttressing hand between her shoulderblades and seizes a flailing arm.

Johannes, in turn, seizes the moment and slides the shift over her head. "You never had to," he replies, voice raised over his progeny's bellow of betrayal.

She thrusts a protesting limb through the arm hole. Anni's resistance ebbs, and she wilts between her father's knees, the picture of dejection. "Oh, my girl, I know," she croons. "It's so unfair, having to wear clothes." She corrals the other arm, now limp and indifferent, and picks her up.

"Nan," she says miserably, a widow wandering the moors in search of her lost love, and lets her head flop against her shoulder. "Nan."

"I know." She smooths her hair and presses a kiss to a plump cheek. "But you look so pretty in your frock, and it's always proper to look nice for guests."

An inquisitive chirp in her ear.

"That's right. We don't want your new friend to see you dirty, hmm? Why don't you help me find something to wear?" She ambles to the wardrobe across from the foot of their bed.

"You shouldn't call him that," Johannes says sharply. "We don't know what he is. It would be a mistake for her to trust so easily."

_Must you make everything so suspicious and miserable?_ she thinks peevishly. _She's only a baby, and why should her life be such a lonely terror?_ Yet she cannot refute the bitter wisdom of his words. An image arises in her mind, Anni six weeks old and nothing but a bundle of wrinkles and need in her receiving blanket, squalling on the scalding hardpan as the Church's footsoldiers stepped over her with careless feet and a woman she had known since she was a girl gazed upon the chaos with malignant, self-righteous triumph. She's still not sure what damage was done that day when they'd left her to the stony mercies of their God; she suspects that her wounds were healed by her father's gift, her broken bones mended by the immortal darkness in her blood. It's not a question she intends to ask, now or ever. She is only glad that Anni seems to have no memory of it.

Johannes at her back, warm and solicitous, and he rests his chin on her shoulder. "I know this life is not easy for you." A lingering kiss on the side of her neck and the fleeting skim of his fangs. "It won't always be like this. It won't be long before I find a way into the holy city, and then I will have all the time in the world."

_You've been saying that for years._ "It's not me I worry for." She opens the wardrobe and privately relishes the faint aroma of wood and dust and mothballs. "I could live in this nothingness as long as I had to, thanks to the endless charity of the Church. But Anni deserves better. We brought her into this world. The last we can do is give her the chance to have friends, playmates. Even we had that much. We had each other when we had nothing else. Who will she have?"

"She'll have us."

"That's not the same, and well you know it." She shifts Anni onto her hip to afford her a view of the wardrobe's contents. "I loved my parents; I never wanted to marry them."

"Did you? Love them. Even after they turned you over?" His eyes shine with a familiar curiosity that fills her with a wistful nostalgia.

"For the longest time, I was convinced they'd come for me. I used to listen for them. Their footsteps on the stairs, their voices in the apse, demanding that they give me back. Parents don't just forget their children. And I had been a good girl. Even bad children had parents who loved them, so why wouldn't my parents come looking for me? Eventually, I realized the truth and stopped looking, stopped listening for them and lurking in the apse just in case so that I could run to them. Even then, I loved the idea of them, of the people I thought they were. When our imp came along, I found myself wanting my mother. I still wonder now and then what they'd think of her. Would they love her, or-?" _Would they be like Sister Mariel and wish death upon her just because of what she is?_ She shrugs. "What about you? Did you still love yours?"

"No." It's a savage growl, but it cannot hide the lie. 

_Oh, but you did, my love,_ she thinks sadly. _I know you too well. You are a creature of stubborn pride and deeply-held secrets, but when you love, you love with every fiber of your being, and it is a love not easily surrendered. Wounded pride might have made a liar of you, but I know you loved them, yearned for what was. I heard it every time you spoke of home, tucked behind a secluded outcropping, far from the fire and the prying eyes of our brothers and sisters. I still remember the warm brush of knee and shoulder, the only intimacy we ever allowed ourselves then, lest we be discovered and separated forever. The gentle, wistful flow of your words on night air turned cold and silver by the light of the moon as I sat wrapped in the warmth of the blanket you offered in a lover's tribute. Love made the river a paradise, and the oak tree of your reminiscences could find no rival, not even in the fabled forests of Eden. That you adored your father was plain to see; if the Church had not stolen you, twisted your life to its draconian purposes, I have no doubt you would have followed in his footsteps and become a fishermen, cast your lines and tended your homestead and raised a family beneath your beloved oak and had no memory of me._

_Pride may have stilled your tongue and stiffened your neck and hardened your heart enough to survive, but it could not extinguish your love. Even now, it still burns, still seeks its cherished object, just as it did for the years of our parting. Even now, I think you would seek them if you could, fly to the home you were denied and see if those who turned you out would take you in again, but mayhap the memory of how to get there is lost like so many others, purged along with your lifeblood when the Queen remade you in her image, or maybe you're afraid of what you'll find when you get there. Maybe it's just as you left it, untouched by the ravages of time, and the river will run bright and clear and bountiful beneath the cool, lush shade of the oak. Maybe the home that forsook you will still be there, neat and solid and welcoming, wood sanded smooth and stained by your father's hard, work-roughened hands, and from the windows will waft the aroma of your mother's cooking. Maybe you'll knock on the door, and when it swings open with the garrulous complaints of aging hinges, your parents will be there, crowded in the doorway and staring at all their answered prayers. They will be older and greyer, and perhaps your father's once-straight shoulders will be bent beneath the implacable weight of years, but their eyes will blaze with the joy of reunion, and they will sweep you into their arms and the home you never should have lost._

_But you have never been the favored child of Fortune, and it would be no surprise to you if you made your way to the promised land of your most treasured childhood memories to find the River Jordan run dry and barren, a leering gully gouged in the earth by the spiteful fingers of a wrathful, vindictive God who can abide no sin, no flaw in his children, or gone stagnant and foul, an abattoir of dead fish and rotting vegetation and lines floating in the water like offal, caked in a fetid slime. And what of your oak, that place of all your blushing bridegroom's hopes when we were young and in love and naive enough to dream of an escape from the clutches of our masters? Perhaps it was more fortunate, hardy in the face of the challenge set before it by the whim of fate, but too much faith has been wrung from you to harbor such a hope. Like as not, it would be as dead as the river, withered and wizened and consumed by rot, leafless and crawling with wood lice and soft as putrid flesh beneath your grief-stricken fingers._

_Or maybe it wouldn't be there at all. Maybe your father felled it after you were gone, excised it from the land just as he'd excised you from his life. Maybe he'd used it to warm his bones just as he'd used you to fatten his coffers. Or maybe he used it for that, too, sold it by the cord when he took his catch to market, parceled out the sweetest landmark of your boyhood to passing strangers for a handful of silver and left nothing but a scar in the soil._

_But my love, I think it's the house that frightens you the most. If Fortune cannot be moved to mercy for a soul that has already borne too much--too much sorrow, too much loneliness, too much bitter disappointment--then the house that holds so much light in your heart will be dark and still and derelict, gone to wrack and ruin and home to nothing but spiders and their cobwebs or a coyote bitch come to whelp her pups in the snug security of a manmade den. No mother, no father, and no siren call of your mother's cooking beckoning you to the table._

_That, alas, is not the cruelest spin of her wheel that you can imagine, though, is it? No, your imagination is more fertile, and far darker in its persuasions; that was true even before the Queen pressed your lips to her terrible baptismal font. The worst truth you could find if you found your way home would be to find the house yet occupied, your parents still carving the daily path of their lives into the worn floorboards your mother swept every morning and evening with a corn-husk broom. You would knock on that door, but when they opened it and found you standing there, the prodigal son returned, there would be no light in their eyes, no joyous shout, but fear and revulsion at the abomination they think you, with your golden eyes and slender fangs and need to draw your sustenance from the lifeblood of others. No loving arms to draw you in, but shouts and screams and pitchforks wielded as weapons. No home to reclaim, but an Eden forever barred against you for the sins of another._

But these words are too sharp for a heart already so restive and unsettled of late, and so she presses against the weight of him in wordless acknowledgment of his answer and turns to press a kiss to her daughter's chubby cheek. She smells of banana and talc and the borax soap the familiar makes twice a week, and her heart gives a wistful pang for a time, not so long ago, when she had fit in the crook of her arm and smelled of new life, warm skin and clean cotton and a hint of warm sugar.

"Which one, do you think, hmm?" She points at the robes that line one side of the wardrobe.

Anni jabs the tip of her index finger into her mouth and utters a contemplative chirr. "Dat!" She punctuates the ringing declaration with an emphatic point, and drool festoons her fingertip like a streamer, strangely lovely as it captures the last, red rays of the sun.

"The yellow one or the blue?" She points at the former and is rewarded with a disdainful grunt and a shake of the head. 

"No!"

"Blue it is. A fine choice." She tugs it from the hanger and tosses it onto the bed. "Never a doubt in your mind, is there, my girl?" She pretends to nibble her temple until Anni shrieks with laughter and yaws dangerously in her arms.

Johannes sidles around her and steadies the baby. "Careful, my little imp," he says with a twitch of his lips. "The wild rumpus might have started, but there's no reason to finish it with blood and tears."

"Wild rumpus? Oh, but love, I can remember nights far wilder," she murmurs slyly, and sets the baby in the middle of the bed.

"That was before we had an audience," he replies, and gently pries Anni's hand from the hem of her shift, which she is trying to shuck with steel-eyed determination.

"Mmm. I thought that was one of your fantasies," she retorts, and pulls her cassock over her head. She tosses it into the hamper and lets the cooling desert air wash over her skin and coax her nipples to attention. It's a sight Johannes has never failed to appreciate, and she hopes it will do him good.

A feral growl low in his throat, and his fingers twitch. "It is, but I had someone more adult in mind. That which has sprung from my loins should never see them," he adds prosaically, and she guffaws.

"I take your point."

"But you are a vision," he says happily, and lets his gaze linger on the swell of her breasts.

"Keep those thoughts in mind, and maybe I'll reward your charity after she's down for the night." She offers him a wicked, promissory smile and picks up her fresh cassock.

"There's nothing charitable about it," he purrs, and the hunger in his gaze makes her skin prickle.

"Anyway, I think we might have been given a gift," she says from the muffling depths of the cassock. Her head emerges from the loose neck like a shoot erupting from the spring soil. "Our friend in there isn't just a Judge," she says softly, lest their guest be less helpless than he appears.

"What do you mean?" Sharp, and his eyes narrow, thoughtful and wary.

She smooths her cassock. "I mean he's _the_ Judge. Judge Dredd."

His response is a bewildered blankness, and her heart drops. _Oh, my love, do you truly not remember? What else has she stolen from you, the foul creature?_

They had all known of him once upon a time. He'd been the stuff of legend around the barracks table, the law made flesh, ruminated on between bites of brown bread in varying degrees of staleness. It was said that he was as pure as the monsignors themselves, righteous and incorruptible, and many of the younger priests and acolytes had daydreamed about the possibility of crossing paths with him. They never had, as far as she knows. Aside from the occasional call to administer extreme unction to a dying Judge who'd come up short on the draw against the criminal tides, the paths of God's children seldom crossed. Priests hunted vampires and delivered the babies of the poor in squalid tenements and buried the dead unnoticed by the teeming city, and Judges were the Lord's retribution, armed with sanctioned death and codified righteousness. That the most revered of them all might have found his way to their godless temple is an irony in which the devil himself would delight, and she imagines him there in his infernal, lightless fastness, fingers curled around his throne of splintered bones and profaned flesh, clicking his heels and sending laughter that tastes of wormwood and brimstone into the frozen nothingness.

"Dredd," she repeats as though repetition can banish the fog the Queen has settled over so much of his past, of who he was before, and shimmies to cajole the soft cotton over her hips. 

A wolf whistle. "If someone ever asked me to define womanhood without words, it would be that." He grins and clucks his tongue.

"You men have your own, you know. That shoulder thing."

He raises an eyebrow. "'Shoulder thing'?"

"Yes. The shoulder thing. When you shrug off your shirts and-" She rolls her shoulders in an awkward attempt at imitation. She flaps her hand in surrender. "I know it when I see it. And stop changing the subject."

"I didn't," he says mildly, and tugs Anni's frock down again. The apple of his eye had been doing her level best to display her own feminine graces. "No. That stays on."

She winces at her daughter's howl of protest at this unwonted restriction on her liberty and turns into his arms. "I'm surprised you don't remember," she says, and threads her arms around his neck. "We loved to gossip about him back in the day. Well, not you and I," she amends with a wistful grin, and draws her lips over the line of his jaw. "We had other thoughts in mind. But the others had no end of gossip. The law made flesh, they called him."

"I don't..." he says slowly, and she sees him grasping for a memory whose absence he has only now discovered.

_How much has she stolen?_ she wonders again, but she only draws her nails over his nape and says, "No matter, my love. What might be of interest to us is that he was their golden child, the one to whom all others aspired."

"So what's he doing out here?"

"That's the question, isn't it? Either he's out here on assignment, or he's been sent on the Long Walk."

"If he's their best, they wouldn't send him into the wastes. The bastards would ride him until he collapsed, just like they did us."

"Maybe he was their best. Maybe he got old, or so gravely wounded that he wasn't worth fixing."

A noncommittal grunt. "Did you see any serious wounds on him?" He trails his fingertips over her spine.

She shrugs. "Depends on what you consider serious. You saw him. He's riddled with scars. There was a nasty scar on his right side that I wondered how he survived, but I'm not sure that would be enough to turn him out with his record."

"Maybe his record wasn't as spotless as rumor had it," he muses. "You know how gossip can be."

"Mmm," she agrees.

He smiles, lupine and exultant. "Or maybe he fell." He nuzzles the nautilus of her ear.

She chuckles and shivers at the pleasurable frisson of contact. "That sounds like hope."

"If so, he could be useful. Perhaps he could be turned to our purpose, convinced to join our cause." Golden eyes sparkle with poorly-suppressed excitement, and he thrums in her arms like an Aeolian harp, enthralled by visions of victory final and triumphant, and of vengeance long delayed.

"I'm not sure a golden child can be so easily swayed," she replies dubiously. "People seldom bite the hand that feeds."

"They do if the food stops coming," he counters bluntly. "You'd be surprised at what the bitter taste of treachery can do."

_No. No, I don't think I would,_ she thinks sadly as he fashions his plans of conquest and retribution. _I remember you before you were reborn to this life beyond death.. You were reserved and gruff and a loyal soldier in the field, hardened to pith and marrow and the cold necessity of duty, but there was a secret sweetness in you, uncorrupted by the tyranny of the Church and its all-seeing eye. You ate less so that I might have more, switched plates in the mess when the proctors weren't looking so that I might have a few more bites of bread or mouthfuls of sweet apple. You had a gentle hand for the stray dogs that roamed the streets, tuck-tailed and thin and cowering as they snuffled for scraps in the alleys and between the feet of dull-eyed passersby, and when you were called to deliver a new life to the poorest of the poor, your hands lingered on the squalling proof of God's love, reverent and protective and trembling as you lay it on its mother's breast and bestowed the blessings of the Lord with solemn, practiced motions. You pitied the poor even if you had not a farthing to spare. It was the Church you despised, with its rigidity and unrepentant hypocrisy, and for all your dreams of change, of a different and kinder life than the one dealt you, you never wished death upon the innocent, never gloried in the thought of destruction for its own sake, in blood and tears and cries for pity that would go unanswered. You emerged from Sola Mira, my love, but a precious and vital part of you was forever lost to that yawning, profane darkness._

"And if he cannot be so moved?"

"Then he dies," he answers simply, and the cold pleasure in it raises the hairs at her nape. "But I'm a fair man. I'll give him the choice."

She pulls away with a parting kiss. 

"Where are you going?"

"If we're going to woo our friend in there to the side of the angels, then maybe we should get him some clothes and a decent breakfast. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." She turns to the wardrobe.

"You're giving him my clothes?"

"Whose else would I give him?" She fingers one of his shirts.

"Your cassocks are all-purpose."

"You've got to be kidding. He's six inches taller, at least. It'd be lucky to cover his calves."

"That's my favorite shirt."

"How can you tell? They're all identical," she asks, but she sighs and reaches for the next one.

"Not that one, either," he whines, sounding for all the world like a cranky toddler.

"Johannes, stop," she chides. "You're worse than Anneliese with her nans."

"Naaaaaaaan!" Anni shrieks, and wobbles manically on the bed, fists clenched and rump outthrust.

"Now you've done it," he mutters sulkily, and scoops Anni into his arms.

" _Mea culpa,_ my love," she says with a penitent grimace. "But Dredd deserves a little dignity. If you don't give him that, then why in God's heaven would he give you anything else? The work of kindness and patience is slow but sure."

"Fine," he grunts, and hitches Anni higher on his hip.

She rises on her toes and gives him a soft, unhurried kiss. "Thank you," she murmurs against the warm velvet of his mouth. "Consider them a noble sacrifice to your cause."

Another dour grunt, and she suspects that he's had his fill of such calls to sacrifice when he has offered up so much of himself to so little end. "There are underclothes in the dresser," he grumbles, and turns toward the door.

She puts a hand on his shoulder, and he turns his head. His eyes glow in the soft light of the bedside lantern, and his fangs peek from beneath his upper lip, delicate as bone china. "How about I make you a few new pairs? We have plenty of fabric. Silk or wool?"

He grins at her, boyish in his delight at her attentiveness. "Why not both?" he wheedles. "I'll be glad to help you take measurements." He waggles his eyebrows.

She snorts. "You're incorrigible. Besides, since when have I needed your measurements?"

"I was trying to lend a veneer of respectability to your inevitable groping," he replies with ruffled innocence.

"And since when have I needed _that_?" She rolls her eyes and swats his ass, and it's all she can do not to guffaw when he preens and struts to the door.

"You hear that, imp? Your mother thinks I'm irresistible," he says smugly.

"Nan!" is Anneliese's only response, unconcerned as she is with matters of parental appeal and the possibility of siblings.

"Yes, nan," he soothes. "We're going to get your nan."

A crow of triumph from Anni at another victory of her unassailable will, and they disappear down the corridor in companionable, if largely unintelligible, conversation.

Liese smiles and shakes her head, and then she sets her mind to the task of finding garments with which to clothe the naked.


	5. Oasis

He's sitting in bed with a pot of piss and a gummed banana half when her voice drifts into the room from just beyond the door. "I have some clothes for you, l-Dredd. Are you decent?"

He's not sure how decent it is to be peering into a pot of your own piss, but his genitals are hidden beneath the covers, and his iniquitous flush of arousal has subsided, and so he supposes he's as decent as he's going to be until he gets those clothes. "I am," he confirms.

A sussurating shuffle from the other side of the door, and he watches the shadows of her feet flicker and dance beneath the door. "I'm coming in," she calls, and after a brief pause to give him the opportunity to finish any unchaste business, she opens the door and slips briskly inside.

"Good morning, brother," she says cheerfully, and slips the lantern onto the nail beside the door. "Well, evening. Apologies. It's been so long since I adopted my husband's nocturnal proclivities that I sometimes forget that the rest of the world considers morning to start with the sunrise." She bustles into the center of the room. "I've found some clothes you might find suitable until I can see to your uniform." She raises her right arm, and for a moment before his brain registers the shirt and light, cotton sweats and boxers it bears, she reminds him of a maitre d', proper and polished and carefully obsequious as she offers him the choicest of seats.

_You bring me clothes, and all I've got for you is a half-eaten banana and a pot of piss that looks like stale ale._ He shifts beneath the bedclothes and is mortified by the slosh of his piss from the depths of the chamberpot. He's keenly aware of the jungly, sour, animal reek of it, yeasty and bitter and proprietary, an animal marking its territory. He scans his surroundings in search of a better resting place than his lap, but the topography of the bed is too yielding and uneven to keep it upright, and so he can only hold it where it sits like some crazed monk with his offering bowl.

Liese approaches the bed, her hair spun gold in the warm glow of the lantern light. She's changed robes since he last saw her, and the light blue of this latest cassock makes her look like a songbird of summer as she alights in the edge of the bed.

_Such emotion-based assessments have no place in a Judge's analysis,_ his long-dead training officer intones. _Emotion invites doubt, and doubt is death._ Still, the thought persists, and he finds himself seized with the boyish, ridiculous impulse to shift the chamberpot away from her, to hide it from her sight as though it were an ugly proof of his failings.

She sets the clothes between them and smooths her hand over the shirt. "I know they're not much, but we make do with what we have, I'm afraid."

"They're adequate." It's far more brusque than he intends, but he's alarmed to find himself entranced by the play of light and shadow across her cheek and the golden fire of her hair. She smells of soap and the simple cotton of her cassock, and he wrestles with the unbecoming and unfamiliar urge to bury his nose in the crook of her neck or the inviting softness of her hair.

She sighs and rises from the bed. "I'd forgotten how hard the Church makes her servants. I'd hoped it might prove different with their less cloistered and sanctified sons." She holds out her hand. "I'll dispose of that while you dress if you like."

He very much _wouldn't_ like, but he knows his coordination is still uncertain after so long without food or water, and even sitting up in bed makes him want to close his eyes and sink into the welcoming embrace of the pillows. If he refuses her help, the odds are better than good that he'll end up facedown in his own cold piss, his weakness exposed to the world. So he hums in dour assent and holds out the chamberpot and fixes his gaze on the wall opposite the foot of the bed.

She accepts his dubious and reluctant gift with another sigh. "There is no shame in weakness, brother, in sickness. We all need help from time to time, and it seems that your time has come. After all that you have done in the service of others, you've earned a little rest. Don't be afraid to take it."

He turns his head and blinks at her. "Are you tempting me to apostasy?"

She rolls her eyes. "Hardly. You can stew in your useless righteous outrage if it suits you. Lord knows I was under the same spell not so long ago. All I'm saying is that there's no dishonor in being cared for until you've regained your strength. I saw your body, brother, your scars. I know how much they asked of you."

He utters a bark of mirthless laughter at that. _You know nothing,_ he thinks as she stands there with his piss in her hands. _I'm sure you've got stories of your own to tell, ones to swap with your frocked brothers and sisters in some barracks kitchen, drinking coffee that's more grit than liquid and secretly wishing it were something a hell of a lot stronger, but you killed vampires, things that were meant to die because they were an affront to God and had no place in this world, blighted and wasted as it is. There was no tragedy in it, no grief for what might've been if this world were a better place. You just hosed off the gore of the abominations and never had a second thought about it._

_You've never been called to a quadruple and waded into the ruin of some family's life to find that dear old dad couldn't handle it when his wife announced she was packing up the kids and the dog and the rabbit and head to her parents' and bludgeoned everyone to death in their sleep, including the baby, so small it was nothing but a blood-soaked lump swaddled in its receiving blanket. You've never found yourself staring down at little yellow and blue birds gone purple and green from the blood that soaked the fabric and wondering how a father could be such a monster. You've never gone into the kitchen to find that selfsame sack of shit blubbering at the kitchen table with his family's blood on his hands and drying to a brown, flaking crust under his nails. You've never had that piece of shit look up at you with tears and snot and blood spatter on his face and try to explain himself, to convince you that he deserved more mercy than he'd shown his family._

They were gonna leave me, _he sniveled, as though they weren't gone as gone could be after he'd splattered them all over the walls and ceiling and let them seep into the cheap, warped linoleum._ You don't understand. They were my life. I couldn't just let them go. What else was I supposed to do? _Blinking up at you in bovine entreaty as he slumped in his chair as though he honestly expected you to understand his fucked-up logic and agree with it, maybe even agree with it with the smell of blood in your nostrils and the memory of what was left of that baby seared into your brain._

_You've never been an officer of the law, forced to listen to that bastard's justifications and reasons when all you wanted to do was send him to hell with a twitch of your finger. You've never noted his defense as per the necessary protocols, ordered him to stand, pronounced him guilty, and blown his head off with a squeeze of the trigger that was almost ejaculatory in its grim satisfaction. But that satisfaction was fleeting as the twitch that inspired it, and there was just a dead perp and another body for the recyc units. You've never stood at the front door with the stink of blood and cordite in your nose and watched battered, dirt-stained androids scrape up bags of meat that used to be human lives, a family, and trundle it them to the recyc center to be turned into ash or fertilizer, whichever suits the brass that day, and before you can rinse the blood from your shoes, you're called to another scene to impose another sentence, and another, and another, until what's left of that baby is the crib is just a hazy blur in the back of your mind._

_You've never dragged ass back to the stationhouse to stand in the shower and wash the blood from nine different perps and God knows how many vics from your skin and watch the filth and grit of the city sluice down your legs and swirl down the drain, and you've never spat only slightly-cleaner water from you mouth and wondered if it wasn't the grit of the city running down the drain, but you. Maybe blood and brains and dirt were all you were made of, and this was the day you collapsed in on yourself beneath the burden you carried._

_You've never clocked out and gone home and wrestled with the images in your head until you wanted to scream and dreamed of jellied brain and bone that had once been a baby in a little-bird blanket and been denied even the cold comfort of cheap, rotgut whiskey and the concupiscent warmth of a willing body. You've never lain in the dark and wondered just how the fuck you were supposed to get up and do this all again tomorrow._

_And you've sure as hell never lived to see the day you outlived your sole purpose._ Sand in his mouth and the dead, loveless gaze of Orelas as he pressed the Communion wafer to his tongue, tasteless as a chip from the concrete facade of a tenement block. _Ding, dong, God is dead, and so soon will you be, my good and faithful servant._

Even his anemic sense of social propriety knows he can't say such a thing when she's standing there with his rapidly-cooling piss in her hand and offering him the clothes from her husband's closet and the sweetly-beckoning promise of a cup of coffee and his first decent meal in weeks, and so he says nothing.

"Would you like me to take that, too?" Mournful now, and he doesn't understand until he remembers the banana on his lap like a severed phallus.

He pinches it between his thumb and forefinger and holds it out, just another unexpected perk of caring for one Joseph Dredd, Law.

She plucks it from his fingers and drops it into the chamberpot with a noisome plop that makes his gorge tighten. "I'll leave you to it, then," she says briskly, and steps back. "I'll be in the restroom just across the hall if you need help getting to breakfast." Her shoulders are as straight as ever, but the welcoming light in her eyes has dimmed, and she sounds tired, defeated.

_Like I said, making friends wherever you go,_ Hershey notes sadly, and shakes her head. 

_It's not your fault,_ he wants to tell her. _The law can abide no attachments that would prejudice its purpose or weaken its resolve,_ but the words hold no force here in this remote outpost on the edge of the forgotten world, and he doubts they would bring her any comfort, and so he keeps them to himself.

_The sooner I leave here, the better,_ he thinks as she nods and retreats with her unpleasant cargo in hand and closes the door behind her.

_For you, or for her?_ Hershey asks, and in his mind's eye, he sees the glow of the lantern light in her hair and casting enticing shadows over the slender ridge of her collarbone. His skin prickles with the memory of the fleeting caress of her robe against his parched, touch-starved skin, and his prick twitches beneath the sheets with restive curiosity.

_Such unjudicial thoughts don't become you, Dredd,_ Orelas intones. _And they are but the first step on the road to perdition._

_I'm a bit further along than that,_ he thinks wryly as he throws back the covers and watches the gooseflesh rise on his pallid legs at the sudden coolness. _I'm in the middle of nowhere and at the mercy of the abomination you swore was just a figment of the citizens' feverish imagination, and I'm about to put on his clothes and sit at his table and partake of his hospitality._

_Better to have died and commended your soul to the Lord,_ Orelas decrees, and he snorts as he swings his legs out of bed and closes his eyes to quash the sudden rush of vertigo. Easy for Orelas to say when he's safe and sound in his ivory tower and being fed off the mandated tithe on the city. His Holiness probably wipes his ass with silk wrought by the hands of a weeping young virgin.

_Blasphemy,_ the affronted Father warns, and lightning flashes in his cold eyes, but he's too tired and sick and hungry to care, and when the vertiginous wave of dizziness passes, he opens his eyes and blinks at the cracked skin of his toes until his vision clears.

_I should ask about a bath,_ he muses as he gropes for the shirt with muddy imprecision. _And a toothbrush._ He can't remember the last time he brushed with more than a water-dampened finger or a dry twig, and his mouth is sour and yellow and tastes of desert sand and dusty parchment and prayers gone to rot. He hollows his cheeks and scours his teeth with an investigatory swipe of his tongue and grimaces in distaste. A toothbrush is most definitely in order if he can find one.

_Still the imperious Judge,_ Hershey sighs. _What makes you think you have a right to ask her for anything after your little display of friendliness and humble gratitude?_

He hums irascibly to himself as he slides his arm into the sleeve of the shirt she had so cheerfully donated to his thankless cause. He can hear the muted, domestic rattle of her as she moves around the bathroom across the hall, and he dimly wonders what became of the piss-pickled banana she whisked away. He hasn't had much of a chance to recon his surroundings, distracted as he's been by the man with his face and the grim, tireless specter of death that has dogged him since his ouster from the grotty, grey, smog-choked protection of the city, but he's fairly certain there's no electricity; a quick glance at the walls reveals a decided lack of either light switches or their concommitant fixtures, nor are there any outlets along the baseboards. Only artfully-bent nails beside the door and the faint, oily whiff of warm glass and softened candle wax.

_Wonder if the toilet is a toilet at all. Maybe it's just a hole in the floor._

_Beggars can't be choosers,_ Hershey points out prosaically. _Anything is better than squatting over a hole in the sand and having nothing to wipe with._

He snarls at the memory of sand and sun-bleached newspaper in his asscrack and shrugs the shirt over his shoulders. It's far looser than it should be, almost a shapeless drape, and he wonders just how much of himself he dripped onto the hardpan while he drifted from settlement to settlement and tried to earn his keep with a trade for which the damned and discarded had no use. His fingers tremble as they fumble with the small, smooth, black buttons, fleshless and stupid and too blunt, as though the knowledge and practice of years have sloughed away along with his weight. It takes him three tries to button some of them, and by the time he's finished, he's tempted to fall back onto the bed and sleep, but he knows that if he succumbs to the impulse, there's a good chance he'll never wake again, that his soul will slip its mortal tether and fly to its final reward.

_And are you so sure it will be a glorious one, my son?_ Monsignor Orelas sneers, and his thin lips twitch and curl with haughty, sour amusement. 

No, he's not, as a matter of fact, but anywhere would be better than here, weak and wasted and stripped of purpose, a guardian of fallen Eden expelled from even so poor a paradise as the one mankind raised on the ashes of the world they ruined. Being a Judge is all he has ever known, the sole purpose for which he was raised from the dust of the earth, and without the surety of his task and the grinding, bloody monotony of his duty, there is nothing left for him but the endless hours of a man in exile and the endless parade of those he could not save--the wives and children and babies obliterated by the dirtbags who couldn't stomach the thought of them living lives of which they were not the inevitable, irresistible center. The ten-year-old girls snatched off the street by small-time hoods in cast-off clothes and sold to kiddie fiddlers in three-piece suits cobbled together from the bleared pages of magazines scavenged from the junk piles that stand as collapsed monuments of the world that was, so long ago. The six-year-old boy smeared across the asphalt, the nigh-unrecognizable casualty of an illegal street race. The grandma dead and blackening in her tiny, dust-choked living room because they're too backlogged to dispatch an ambulance. Facing Divine judgment in the hereafter would be better than living with his own.

Another wave of dizziness as he bends to slip the waistband of the boxers over his ankles, and it's a wonder he doesn't end up on his face with his scrawny ass in the air, a turkey snared in a shakepole fence, as the ancient saying goes. He's just tugged the boxers to his calves when there's a circumspect rap upon the door.

"It's Liese, Judge. I've found a toothbrush if you'd like to brush your teeth."

_Bless her,_ he thinks, but he's not sure his legs will hold him, and the thought of her seeing him in his helpless nakedness fills him with a childish shame that makes him want to curl in on himself. He gropes for the sheet and pulls it over his midsection, and hopes she won't notice that his shorts are still around his knees. "Thank you. I'm...still not ready."

A pause, and he can _feel_ her examining that nugget of information. "I see. May I enter?" Gentle and solicitous, and its a measure of his weakened physical and psychological state that it makes his chest ache with a yearning for something he's never had and therefore should not miss. Or need.

"Yes."

She shoulders open the door and slips inside, tray in hand, and for a guiltily-relieved moment, he thinks she's brought breakfast to him, aware, perhaps, of the weakness he is trying to hide, but when she draws nearer, he sees only a wooden-handled toothbrush, a washcloth, and a basin of water. Her gaze flicks to the boxers wrapped around his calves, and she sets the tray on the nightstand.

"Still weak, then? I should have guessed. You were in and out of consciousness last night. Frankly, I expected to lose you." She pushes the sleeves of her cassock past her elbows. "Would you like some help? That can't be comfortable." She nods at his ankles and the puddle of boxers that engulfs his feet.

"That would be indecent exposure," he grouses. "And probably lascivious conduct." He instinctively hunches in a bid to cover himself.

"I'm a priestess, lovely," she says gently. I've seen nakedness in all its forms, from the newly-born to the newly-dead. It's just flesh until it isn't."

"But-"

"But it's yours," she finishes for him. "And with modesty comes dignity. I know." A memory flashes in her eyes, sharp and bitter and unnerving, but it's gone before he can decipher it, and when she speaks, her voice is low and calm. "As I said before, I know the vows you took, brother. Do you think it would give me pleasure to have you violate them?" She clasps her hands in front of her and rocks back on her bare heels.

_Why not? You've already broken your own,_ snipes an uncharitable voice in his head as his gaze drifts to the cross etched into her forehead. _According to the Church, you became the abomination's concubine with joy in your heart, and you birthed his whelp without an ounce of regret. It's not a stretch to think you would happily entice me to profane mine._

_According to the Church, you profaned yours yourself when you passed Anderson despite two automatic fails,_ points out the stiff, uneasy voice of conscience and insulted honor. _Perhaps you should remove the beam from your own eye before you sneer at the mote in hers._

He thinks of the tender facility of her hands in his hair as he lay in the tub, too weak and keep his eyes open, and certainly too weak to defend himself against any dark predations she might have entertained as he floated in the water with nothing to shield him save her restraint. The soothing murmur of her voice as she worked the suds through his hair and rinsed the grit and oil and dead skin from his dehydrated scalp. No lascivious whispers in his ears, no leering invitations to shed his righteousness in the heat of a torrid moment, no sly, proprietary slither of her tongue against his sun-baked lips and into his dry, slack mouth, only reassuring murmurs and faint exhortations to lay his burden down and rest.

He thinks of the baby, knee-high to a chair leg and determined to nurse him in her own fashion, little face fierce with resolve as she tugged at the sheets and attempted to scale Mount Bedmore. The insistent, pulpy press of her taste-tested banana against his lips. _She gets that from her mother,_ the man with his face had said proudly, and he suspects he's right; a child's soul comes from God, but the lessons it carries are the gift of their parents, and his hands and heart and head are stained with the legacy of those whose parents bequeathed to them nothing but sorrow and pain and the bitter injunction to survive no matter the cost. Sometimes the last was all they had, and it proved a sorry frame on which to hang a life, left them wasted and broken and too tired to care for themselves, let alone anyone else, and he rolled up on his Lawmaster to find them splattered across the pavement with their last testament pinned to their chest, illegible beneath the blood and irrelevant to the recyc droids who swept them up and omitted from his incident log.

_Isn't that all you have, Dredd?_ Anderson asks. _The order to survive?_

_The order to serve the law,_ he corrects her.

_There doesn't seem to be much difference to me,_ she replies, and her eyes are knowing, almost sad.

_I'm fine,_ he thinks stubbornly. _I'm fine._

"No," he concedes at last. "I don't."

"There's one for my good books, I suppose," she says brightly, and he's not sure if she's indulging in a bit of sarcasm or not. "There's two ways we can go with this. I can either find a chair, weigh it down with books or whatever else I can find, and hope that works as a temporary walker, or you can trust me and let me be your equally-temporary lady-in-waiting so that we can eat before sunup. Your choice."

The chair would be the more prudent solution, chaste and sterile and a testament to his commitment to mortification and self-reliance, but he is tired and hungry and adrift, and he needs a sense of connection to remind him that he's still here, still a part of the world even if its masters have turned from him, and so he meets her gaze and slowly holds out his arms.

"Ha! You surprise me, Judge!" She steps forward, eyes fixed on his face. "I give you my word that your body is your own. Use me as you need to support yourself, and don't be afraid to ask for my hands if you need them. My eyes will not leave your face or chest until you declare yourself decent, all right?" She holds out her arms as living buttresses.

"Much better today," she observes when he pulls himself upright and sways between the braces of her arms. "You were all but dead weight last night." She shuffles closer, and, true to her word, her gaze never leaves his face.

He uses one hand to steady himself on her proffered forearm and the other to grope for the waistband of his boxers, ass hovering uncertainly above the edge of the bed like a moon plunging from its orbit. Fingers snag in elastic, and he tugs them upward with grim determination. "Are you hurt?" he grunts, and hitches the elastic over his thigh.

Her lip curls in a lazy smile, and she shifts her weight to keep him from listing too far to the right. "My back is a bit tight this morning, but nothing I won't survive. Certainly better than slithering into a vampire warren in zero visibility." She shifts with him when he reaches for the opposite side of the waistband.

"I'm sorry," he says, and he is, for her back and for this. His job is to protect civilians, not break them. He rocks back on his heels in an effort to relieve her of his weight, and the edge of the bed butts the backs of his calves. He sways and wobbles and sits with an undignified thump.

"No need to be. It's not your fault I'm out of shape and practice. Motherhood has made me soft." She rises on her toes in a bid to stretch her spine, and he hears the muffled crackle and pop of vertebrae.

_If this is soft, then I wonder what you were before,_ he muses, but he says, "Were you a nurse, too?"

Another furtive fusillade as she twists her torso from side to side. "Not in the strictest sense of the word, but priests are jacks of all trades--warriors, counselors, meal delivery service, veterinarians, midwives, gravediggers--and the Church didn't exactly spare no expense when it came to the aches and pains of its footsoldiers, so yes, I was a nurse, so to speak. We all were."

He hums in wordless commiseration and thinks of the Justice Department infirmary, a sterile, well-stocked monument to thin-lipped parsimony, where almost anything could be had but use was discouraged as indulgence. Wounds were cleaned and stitched with no regard to the scars they would leave behind, and pain medications were strictly rationed by stingy overseers with pinched mouths and suspicious eyes. As the poster child for the department, he had been treated better than most, yet even he had gone without, had gritted his teeth against the dull waves of agony in his mending gut and resisted the impulse to find more potent relief in the dark, febrile heart of the city, where shadows settled over the alleys and tinpot courtyards like smog and pooled in the corners like oil.

"You're not an imposition if that's what you're thinking. Are you decent?"

"Hmm?" The meaning of the query penetrates his hunger-addled brain, and he spares a quick glance at his waist. Aside from a thin, dark trail of hair underneath his navel that disappears into the waistband of his boxers, there's nothing untoward on view, and the knots of tension at the base of his neck and in the small of his back release their pernicious hold. "Yes."

Her spine loses its careful, formal rigidity, and she retreats a pace. "Fabulous. If you'll rest your hands on my shoulders, I'll help you with your pants. I think we both hear breakfast calling."

His stomach gurgles in hearty agreement, and he sidles from one foot to the other in stone-faced consternation. He's been exhausted before, sleep-deprived and battered and nursing wounds beneath his body armor, but he's never been so drained, aching muscles and exposed nerves and too little sleep. Even on his worst days, when he'd had to work a triple with nothing but the protein bar in his medkit and a thermos of coffee thick as treacle, he'd never felt so raw and frayed at the edges, never been gripped by the terrible suspicion that the advantage lay with whatever waited in the shadows with bared teeth and sharp claws and a lust for blood on its tongue. His sojourn in the desert has stripped him of his hard-won armor and pared him to a pith and sinew that feels as insubstantial as air beneath his abraded skin. He is the law, but its reassuring righteousness is no longer with him. He is as helpless as a overturned beetle writhing its last on the hardpan, and if she wants to, this strange woman with mercy in her hands and an insouciant devil's kiss in the corner of her mouth can snuff him out with a shove and a savage twist of his neck.

He sidles to the opposite foot again, a thoroughbred spooked by the conspiratorial whisper of the wind, and she rests a hand on his hip to still him. His skin prickles and ripples with gooseflesh, and he wishes there were no fabric between them. The thought surprises him in its impurity, and the words _unjudicial touching_ dance behind his teeth, but he can't bring himself to let them slip past their plaque-rimed threshold and compound his sin by giving utterance to the lie that he does not crave such contact.

_And such weakness of conviction is why you are no longer fit to serve the law,_ Monsignor Orelas says, and his eyes glint with cold disdain. _You were meant to be a pillar, the foundation upon which we built our justice, but your self-indulgence has proved you unworthy and disgraced the uniform you swore to honor. Less than a month since you left our sheltering embrace, and you covet the touch of a woman._

_Not a woman's touch,_ he counters even as his cheeks warm. _A human touch. A reminder that I'm not just a dead man walking, a meatbag meant to take the hits until it's my turn in a recyc unit._

_And who says you deserve to be anything else?_ the monsignor sneers. _Perhaps that is the path the Lord has chosen for you. Who are you to resist it, to turn from the cup He offers you? You have dangerous airs, my son. Perhaps your taint runs deeper than any of us realized._

"All right, sw-Judge?" Her fingers circle the spar of his hip in a reassuring caress.

His ears don't miss the thwarted endearment, and the monsignor's piscine lips thin at the yearning it inspires. _Deep, indeed,_ he murmurs. "Yes."

She drops into a squat and rebounds before he can blink, and nimble fingers make short work of the button of his jeans. "Zipper," she says, and she grips the metal tab and tugs it upward. "And there we have it. Why don't you sit down and sort yourself, brush your teeth, wash your face. Once you're ready, we'll be off." When he sinks onto the edge of the bed, but makes no move toward the bedside tray, she asks, "Would you like some privacy, then?" The careful solicitude in it makes him want to snarl that he's not an invalid dammit, some puling cripple who needs the world explained to him in small words meant for children and its savage corners blunted with gauze and candyfloss. It's a petty and ungrateful thought, and a rich one, considering he doesn't trust his legs to bear him up for more than a few steps, and he shifts uneasily and forces the word "Please" through a clenched jaw.

If she notices his helpless fit of adolescent pique, she gives no sign. She dips her head in acknowledgment and withdraws toward the door. "Call when you're ready. We might start without you since Anni isn't used to waiting, and she gets cranky when she's hungry."

As though she's heard the maternal indictment of her character, Anni's voice drifts down the hall, piping and peevish and imperious, a spoiled princess summoning her tardy lady-in-waiting. "Mumm-mummm!" An obstreperous thump, an empty tankard slammed against the table by a belligerent drunk. "Muuuuummmm-muumm!"

"M'lady calls," she mutters drily, and performs a sardonic curtsey before she spins on her heel and disappears through the door. "I'm coming, my girl. There's no need to scream down the house," she calls, and is rewarded with a renewed summons.

He waits until silence has settled over the room again before he reaches for the tray. There's nothing lewd about brushing one's teeth, even by the purse-mouthed, tight-kneed standards of the Church, and yet the thought of doing so in front of someone else strikes him as a perversely intimate act, as though he had willingly stripped himself bare and offered himself up for lingering scrutiny. It's stupid and ridiculous and prudish, and yet it carries the weight of truth, and he casts a watchful eye at the door as he reaches for the damp washcloth.

The damp, warm, clinging caress of the washcloth against his face is an ecstasy bordering on the erotic, and his lips part in wordless hosanna as he trails the cloth over his bobbing Adam's apple. He wishes he could tear off his clothes and indulge in a full-body scrub, but to succumb to the impulse would sap the rest of his strength, and his benefactor would likely find him in a slack-jawed, snoring sprawl atop the covers, and the need for food keeps him moving.

His teeth are far less enamored of his introduction of a toothbrush after their protracted estrangement, and he grimaces at the stinging, needling rasp of the bristles against his gumline. The tang of copper fills his mouth, and an indignant voice in his head hisses that it might've been kinder if he'd just sucked on a fistful of sand. The water he spits into the basin when he's finished is pink and flecked with blood and grit, and the taste of stale breath coats his tongue like thrush.

_Well, if either of us were entertaining unchaste thoughts, this ought to kill them,_ he thinks as he scours his teeth with his tongue and spits again. The bilious, dead taste refuses to surrender its tenacious grip or submit to the onslaught of baking soda and mint, and so he scrubs his tongue with disgusted ferocity. 

When he's exacted as much dour vengeance on his mouth as he can and his tongue has begun to burn in protest, he breaks off the assault and tosses the brush onto the tray with a snort. His stomach demands that he stop screwing around and advance the cause of filling it, but such a gargantuan task seems beyond him. The door is ten feet away, he guesses, but to his leaden body, it seems an endless gulf of trackless desert, all sand and sun and swirling grit that flicks against his visor like sleet.

He should be grateful; if Johannes hadn't found him, he'd be so much rotting meat in the sulfurous white heat, blackened and mummified and beckoning to the carrion crows and the slat-sided jackals and coyotes who scavenge for a miserable survival in the scorched wastes, but all he can muster as he slumps on the edge of the bed and stares into the washbasin, a cataracted seer gazing into his mirror, is confusion. He's not sure what he expected when they flung wide the doors of the city and disgorged him into the wastes, Jonah vomited from the belly of the whale, but it certainly wasn't this, a small, crowded room bulging with the bric-a-brac and clutter of anonymous lives and smelling of dust and brittle wood and old varnish and aging lace.

In truth, he'd never given it much thought at all. Perhaps he should have, given that his training officer, Judge Fargo, had lived long enough to take the Long Walk, but he had never expected to live be so lucky, so blessed by the hand of grace. He had thought that he would die like so many others before him, caught in an ambush or cut down in a firefight with too many perps for even all the hosts of heaven to handle or just too old and too slow on the draw after so many years in the crushing maelstrom of the meat grinder.

_And you never expected to become what you hunted,_ Orelas adds. _Criminal. Outcast. Scum._

Even if he had considered it, this was not the path he had foreseen for himself once his boots _had_ found the sand that divided the righteous from the lost. He's seen too much to be a naive child, to think he would find a secret wonderland hidden from him by the conniving, conspiratorial Church, but the doggedly committed part of him that had seen him to his duty for every shift in stone-eyed silence had harbored some distant hope that there would be a few lives he could save before the heat and the gnawing hunger and the isolation took him.

_But all you found was precisely what we said you would, a cohort of sinners who have been cast into the fiery hell by almighty God and left to repent their sin until he shall judge them worthy of his mercy or the eternal fire._

Hard eyes and lean bodies and skin gone to leather in the heat of the sun. Men with blunt fingers and teeth gone black with indifference and tobacco, plugs bulging in their cheeks like tumors, and women with lank hair and deflated breasts and an iron desperation in their grips as they pulled him into the cool of an eave to offer him the warm, fleshless press of their bodies in exchange for a sip of silty water or a fist in the head of the husband whose mouth has forgotten endearments and whose hands have forgotten any tenderness they had once possessed. Children more in need of a decent meal than the salvation of souls joined to their bodies in the most tenuous of unions, as scrawny and watchful and slat-sided as the coyotes and jackals that haunted the borders of their dirty, ramshackle settlements, grubby fingers jammed into restless mouths and bare feet scuffing in the dirt as they trailed behind him, doubtless hoping for a scrap of food or a few coins filched from a pocket when his attention was diverted by a comely face or a greater threat. 

What he had not found was joy, or hope, or faith, and certainly no charity, no rest for the weary traveler or food for the hungry.

_You could get some of that, at least, if you'd move your ass,_ he chides himself. From the foreign country of the house beyond comes the intoxicating aroma of coffee and frying bacon, and it gets him to his feet. He sways, and the room lists, spooling endlessly outward. The grain of the wood is rough on his bare soles as he shuffles forward, and why does it feel like he's moving through rapidly-setting concrete, the weight of the room sucking greedily at his legs, a mouth slurping the last of the marrow from a chicken bone?

_Make the door,_ he thinks gamely. _It's ten feet. Just get moving._

He's spent by the time he gains the door, and a thin rime of sweat prickles beneath his shirt. He's far weaker than he anticipated, and the realization unsettles him. He'd thought a rest and some food and water would be enough to restore him, if not to fighting trim, then to the point of fighting chance, that he could enjoy this meal and thank them for their hospitality and be on his way with a refilled canteen, but he'll be lucky if he clears this room, and a jaded, sand-scoured voice in the back of his mind wonders if he'll ever leave this house. Maybe he won't. Maybe this is where it ends for him, in a choked little room in the middle of nowhere. 

_At least there will be someone to know you've died,_ the jaded voice volunteers, and in his mind's eye, he sees Liese coming down the hall to find the door barred by the slack, final weight of his body, all the patient work of her hands and all the scarce resources she shared gone for nothing in the end. Or maybe it will be the baby, toddling down the hall on her stolid little feet to check on her ungrateful patient. Maybe she'll bull her way through a cracked door and stand over him with another banana in her hands, gnawing at its sweet meat and wondering why he forsook the comfort of a soft bed in favor of the hard floor. Maybe she would surmount him like a vanquished summit, feet planted on the cowed ridge of his spine and fists raised in victory. Or maybe she would use him as a footstool, plop her diapered bottom onto him and finish her beloved nan in small, unhurried bites.

He turns the doorknob, though that, too, takes far more energy than he would like, and reels backward as the door swings inward. It's only his tenacious hold on the wobbly, tarnished brass that keeps him upright, and it shifts in the thin, wooden socket like a loose tooth. He staggers forward in dismayed surprise at his lack of coordination and curls his fingers around the edge of the door in a bid to keep the door from slamming shut again, but he only succeeds in smashing them in the door.

"Fuck!" he snarls, and clamps his freshly-brushed teeth shut against a howl of agony. He lurches backward again, and the door yawns, come for a second taste. He tucks his wounded hand against his body and releases his grip on the knob. Another backward step, and then he sways where he stands, chest heaving. It's been ninety seconds and ten feet, and he feels like he's run a marathon in lead shoes.

His ill-starred trek has not gone unnoticed, it seems, because hurried footfalls sound in the hall, and in his mind's eye, he sees Liese striding down the hall, the fabric of her cassock snapping crisply around her ankles as she comes. He decides he's seldom heard a more welcome sound.

She stops in front of the partially-open door. "Judge, are you all right?"

He's amused and dimly touched to see that her face is turned aside to grant him privacy. "I'm decent," he offers. When she meets his gaze, he says, "I was coming to find the table, but..." He hesitates. To admit weakness is to invite danger and death, but as he sways on his feet and his wounded fingers throb and sweat prickles and ripens on his skin, he can see no other choice. "It was harder than expected," he finishes feebly.

"God save us from the fragility of male ego," she mutters, and steps inside. "I told you to call me when you were ready."

"It was only a room," he protests. "I'm not a damn invalid."

"Right now, you are," she retorts sharply, but then her tone softens. "And there's no shame in it. "Heaven knows what happened to you out there, but you're lucky to be alive. You need to heal. Stop being an ass and let yourself." Her eyes narrow when she catches sight of his hand tucked against his chest. "What's the matter with your hand?" she demands.

He searches for a respectable way to confess that he slammed it in the door during his drunken waltz across the room, but can find none. The truth purifies, he supposes. "I caught it. In the door."

"Can you move it?"

He gives his fingers an experimental stretch and flex and is relieved to feel only a dull, fading throb. No shift and grind of displaced bones, no bright, pulsing flare of ruptured tendon. "Yes. Nothing broken."

"Thank God for small favors. Let's get you to the table. There's more light out there for a proper look, and we can get you fed."

"I'm not sure I can make it."

"Not alone, maybe, but that's what I'm here for." She steps forward and slides beneath his arm, a living buttress of cotton and dogged perseverance. "The light and air will do you good."

It's the food he's interested in, and the woody astringency of coffee gets him moving in a jerky, ponderous wobble.

"Excellent," she says jauntily. "Journeys end in delicious eating, hmm?" She nudges the door with the toe of her slipper until its progress is stayed by the doorstep. "A sideways shuffle ought to do it."

The maneuver proves less complicated than he fears, and the corridor into which they step in narrow and shadowed and blessedly cool compared to the stuffiness of the room. His shoulder skims the near wall, and his hand shoots out to probe for unseen obstacles that might send them crashing to the floor in a tangled heap. 

"There's nothing in your way," Liese promises. "You might find one of Anni's toys the hard way, but she usually confines those to the living room and our bedroom, and they're squashy anyway."

The creak of the wood underfoot and the breathy rustle of her cassock against the far wall, and as they draw nearer to the end of the corridor and the glow of firelight, his eyes begin to take in the details. Thinly-plastered walls devoid of paintings or photographs or homey accents. 

They emerge into a small living room that boasts a jumble of mismatched furniture and a large afghan rug. The couch, the room's centerpiece, is faded and worn and draped with a thick, grey, woolen throw. It's accompanied in its solemn duty of purveyor of the comforts of hearth and home by a pair of overstuffed chintz wingback chairs, one posted adjacent to the sofa, an old woman warming her edematous legs before a roaring fire, while the other stands at stiff attention beside the squat, stone fireplace mounted in the front wall. Sure enough, the rug is buried beneath an avalanche of soft toys--homemade dolls with amorphous bodies and stunted limbs and lifeless, lopsided eyes; squashy blocks whose sides collapse and bulge in non-Euclidean shapes that make his eyes sting to look at them; what he can only assume is a sock squid fashioned from old footwear and recycled earflaps. An old book with a cracked leather binding sits on an end table beside the sofa, and the satin of its ribbon bookmark shines in the drowsy light of candles that flicker from the depths of glass wall sconces that sprout from the walls like calla lilies and exotic, hothouse orchids.

The smell of coffee and bacon is sharper now, and it spurs him on. His mouth waters and cramps with longing for the bitter, scorched-earth acidity of coffee and the rich, unctuous savor of fat, and he's dimly aware of a faint, helpless whine as he lurches along, bent against an unseen wind. Snatches of sound, of language in his ears, but they are indistinct, and of no more consequence than the buzzing of a fly. He takes a giant, scissoring stride and lists sharply to the right, but he does not topple. For a moment, he doesn't understand how he's managed to defy the immutable law of gravity, and then reason reasserts itself above the ravening, animal imperative of his hunger.

Liese.

He forces himself to stop. A sidelong glance reveals her to be hunched and tousled by his side, her face a dismaying puce. _No air,_ he thinks in logy consternation, and then he realizes that in his haste to find the food his nose tells him is within his reach, he's horse-collared her in the crook of his elbow.

He relaxes his throttling arm. "Sorry." He shifts his weight away from her as much as he dares. "Are you all right?"

She nods, and her throat bobs with a convulsive swallow, but she doesn't speak until her cheeks have lost the horrible lividity of imminent suffocation. "Y-yes." It's a laryngeal croak, and he winces internally and suppresses the impulse to offer another useless apology. She swallows again and brushes her hair behind her ear. "There will be food in plenty when we get there," she says, and her voice is stronger, though still too raw. 

"Liese?" Johannes' voice drifts from just out of sight, and on its heels comes an excited screech followed by the sharp crack of wood on wood.

"Settle down, Anni," she calls, and grimaces. "It's a wonder she's never flipped herself."

"It's not for want of trying," Johannes announces in a soft drawl, and Dredd blinks in surprise. His approach had been swift and silent as smoke, as though he'd simply risen through the floorboards in a swirling mist. His eyes are brilliant in the flickering candlelight, mesmerizing, and he finds himself gazing into them with an erotic intensity.

_I'm falling,_ he thinks stupidly, and his lips part. _I'm falling, and I don't think I care._ His breathing slows, and his vision grows painfully acute, and he wonders if this is what it's like to take a hit of slo-mo. He's keenly aware of every pore on his body, every hair and scrape and old scar. That penetrating golden gaze is a physical weight against his skin, the fleeting brush of unseen fingers against his face. His muscles go to tallow beneath his skin, and his hunger is forgotten, and all he wants to do is let himself tumble into the abyss.

"Are you all right?" Johannes says sharply, and the spell is broken as he closes the distance between him and Liese and cradles her face in his hands. "Did he hurt you?" The low rumble of a cougar crouching in the concealing brush, and the scant spittle in his mouth goes dry because he knows that if her answer isn't to his liking, he'll never see the breakfast he wants so badly.

"I'm fine, love," she assures him, but her reedy rasp is hardly convincing. "He's just heavier than he looks, and hunger has put the spurs to him. After so long without a decent meal, you can't blame him for that."

The skeptical grunt that emerges from Johannes suggests he could fault him for that and a great deal more besides if the mood so took him. He tilts Liese's head to one side and inspects her neck for signs of injury. There's no visible redness or bruising, thank God, but Johannes draws his fingers over the glands and muscles on either side. "Does anything hurt?" A hunter crooning to a spooked doe.

She shies from his touch at a sore spot below her jaw on the left. "Bit sore there," she says, and his fierce concentration deepens into a scowl. He draws his fingers over the spot again, to soothe this time, and then he rounds on him.

"I'll thank you to treat my wife with the same care she's shown you," he growls, and his amber eyes flash, no longer limpid and beckoning but ablaze inside his face, the diseased and avaricious glow of a funeral pyre.

_He could kill me if he chose, and I think he would if it were up to him. A lunge and a twist of his hand is all it would take._ The hairs at his nape rise, and he takes an involuntary step back. Liese follows him to compensate, and Johannes' scowl deepens.

"Perhaps you didn't hear me, friend." The cougar poised to spring.

"Yes, he did," Liese agrees as she regains her balance, "but he's sick and weak and hungry. Johannes," she urges gently. "Please."

Those golden eyes soften to summer honey. "Give him to me." He holds out an arm.

She slips from beneath him with a muffled sigh, but she doesn't release her hold until Johannes establishes his grip.

_I'm not_ that _weak,_ he wants to grouse, but complaint seems unwise, and so he keeps the thought to himself and does his best not to sag against his new traveling companion.

"Go get settled," Johannes says to her. "Make sure Anni doesn't turn her whole world upside down."

Liese moves in for a kiss. "As you say, husband. Our luck, she'll come toddling in here any second. She's getting quite nimble."

"Liar help us," he mutters, but Dredd knows pride when he hears it.

The baby does not appear, but her mother leaves her proud father with a soft kiss and scurries toward the kitchen, and he's left to stand with his doppelganger at this domestic crossroads.

"My wife has taken quite a shine to you," Johannes says as he assumes the yoke of his arm. "I can't imagine why. Maybe because you're such a handsome devil." He flashes him a jaunty grin.

He senses dangerous ground and tries to escape the conversation with a determined step, but he might as well be bent against the will of God for all the good it does. His foot paws the air and lands with a dull thud, and he moves not an inch. A sidelong glance shows Johannes studying him, jaunty grin fixed and eyes sharp and assessing.

"I love my wife." Conversational, as though he were discussing the weather or his plans for a lazy Sunday afternoon." "More than God, more than anything in His beloved creation that He abandoned when it no longer served His purpose."

"Blasphemy," he says automatically, though it shouldn't surprise him, coming as it does from a man who has profaned himself with the blood of the damned.

"'Blasphemy'?" Johannes repeats, all wounded innocence, but his lips curve in a sly, vulpine smile. "No, my friend. It's the truth. Think about it. Before He created man, in His image, as He puts it, he created the angels just so He could have someone to worship him while He sat on His throne, getting harder by the second at every note of hosanna, like as not. A whole race of beings created expressly to sing His praises, and it wasn't enough. He wanted more. So he created man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul, amen." He's taken on the cadence of a preacher in the throes of revival, drawn the fading recollection of the holy spirit from his veins, and for a fleeting instant, Dredd sees the young priest he must have been. 

"But even that wasn't enough," Johannes continues. "Man was a nice little monument to His vanity, but he was kind of boring down there in his lonely little paradise, and his lone voice wasn't loud or long enough in His praise to stroke the Almighty ego."

"Blasphemy," he repeats, a warning now, bred of habit.

"No, it isn't. And even if it were, what are you going to do about it?" Another grin, but his eyes are flat and hard as river stones. "Besides, aren't you the secular arm of the law?"

"The law is the law."

"Oh, you're a purist." He chuckles. "I should have guessed. A true believer. Except it's all a lie, my friend. Trust me, I'm a holy child of God. I know all their dirty little secrets."

He's never heard such brazen blasphemy; it's apostasy, really, and every fiber of his being howls for him to correct this terrible sin and serve the law, but he has no means to enforce any righteous edicts he might issue--his Lawgiver is nowhere to be found, and his strength has deserted him. If Johannes were to let him go, he would crumple to the floor in a helpless sprawl of limbs, defenseless and twitching and starfishing idiotically on the floor, his fingers scrabbling stupidly against the rough grain. So he merely blinks at him, a rebuke lodged behind clenched teeth.

"Hit a nerve, did I?" Delighted. "The truth always did make the Church squirm in its holy vestments. Like I said, it wasn't enough, and so He made man a companion, a helpmeet, as the Church Fathers call the inestimable gift of woman, and ordered them to be fruitful and multiply. All so they could spend eternity kissing His ass."

_He would burn for that if we were in the city,_ he thinks. _Right on the cathedral green. They'd flog him until the blood watered the grass and his back hung in tatters, and then they'd pour salt in the wounds, cover him in sweet oil and pitch and light him up like a Roman candle. They'd broadcast it throughout the city and leave him there to smolder and rot until their noses could no longer endure the stink with sniffy, becoming dignity. As a lesson to the people on the wages of disobedience and an offering unto the Lord as proof of their devotion._

But they are not in the city, and the Church fathers are far away, secure in their citadel. There is only the rightness of law and the force he can give it, and right now, it's all he can do to stay upright, propped against a shoulder hard as coiled steel.

His conscience demands he try. "You twist the truth. God commanded man to be fruitful and multiply so that we might be stewards of the earth and be glad of His creation."

"And a bang-up job we've done on that," comes the wry retort. "You can't truly believe that." He snorts. "We couldn't even stop ourselves from pillaging the one tree in the garden we were forbidden to touch. The idea that we could care for the paradise He "gave" us with the dedication and restraint required is a joke, and I suspect He knew it. After all, He's omniscient, isn't He? Which means He knew how it would go before He started and did it anyway because the need to feed His ever-starving ego was more important than the future suffering of untold billions. Such is the love-" He spits the word like a curse. "-of our Heavenly Father. I have but a single daughter, and I would lay waste to the earth to keep her safe. Tell me, brother, what's his excuse?"

The question takes him by surprise. The Bible is the basis of the law, but he has never much concerned himself with the broader issues of how or why. It is enough to know that it is, that so it was written by wiser and holier men than he. He shifts, and his stomach rumbles miserably. "He sent His only begotten son to atone-"

Johannes scoffs. "A bribe from an abusive father with a guilty conscience. And what of the angels?"

"What about them?" he replies blankly. He knows he should care a great deal more about this conversation and its stunning flouting of the law to which he is bound unto death, but all he wants is to collapse into a chair and wrap his lips around food that isn't a wistful dream.

"They were His first children, and what did He do? He ordered them to bend the knee to this new creation, to sing its praises as they sang His, and when one of them protested, asked why they should prostrate themselves before such a rude and flawed creation, laud such an obvious mistake, He cast him down from heaven and banished him and all who would follow him to eternal, frozen darkness. All because he did not wish to surrender his father's love, a love he had earned through years uncounted of faithful service. He was punished for his devotion, and so he decided to carve his own kingdom from the nothing he'd been given, to make a life for himself in spite of his father, and for that, he is despised."

He stares at him in hazy disbelief. "You speak of the Devil."

"The first pioneer," Johannes agrees cheerfully, and hitches him more snugly against his buttressing shoulder.

"Is that what you consider yourself? A pioneer? Is that why you serve the vampire queen?"

"I'm just a man who sees things clearly, which brings me to my original subject. My wife, bless her tender heart, has taken a shine to you. I haven't seen her so happy and glad of purpose in a long time, and I would burn the heavens to ash to see her happy. So if you harm her in any way, I will pursue you to my last breath, and I will not grant you the mercy of death until you have properly atoned. Do we understand each other, friend?" His tone is light, but his hand is adamant and cold steel against his ribs, and those yellow eyes are lifeless as taxidermist's glass inside his face.

_This is the last face I would ever see,_ he realizes. _This is death made manifest, and there would be no comfort in the law, no sanctity or claim to justness that would shield me from it. There would be only blood and pain and the remorseless, malignant purpose of a predator, and I suspect the end would be a long time coming._

"Yes."

"Good." A sunny smile. "Then let's get you that breakfast."

_I shouldn't be here,_ he thinks as Johannes hauls him across the floor as though he were but a toddler. _I'm in the lion's den, and there's no telling if or when he'll decide to bite._ He should leave, should wait until they bed down for the night and put as much distance between them as his legs can manage before they fail again.

_What you should do is render judgment,_ Monsignor Orelas snaps, and his eyes flash with cold disapproval. _I thought you stronger than that, my son._

And he had been, not so long ago, but now it's a wonder he can move at all. Even if his Lawgiver dropped into his hand, he doubts he'd be able to aim with any semblance of accuracy, and he's as likely to put a bullet in the baby as he is to bring down his ostensible quarry.

_The fruit of the poisoned tree is as worthy of judgment as the tree itself,_ the law reminds him, stoic and unbending. _As the product of sin, the wages should be the same and rendered without hesitation or sentiment._

The fruit in question trills at him as her father carries him into view and deposits him into the nearest empty chair at a rectangular table. She clutches a tiny, plastic spoon in one plump fist, and her mouth is ringed with smears of what looks like oatmeal.

"Giiiiij!" she screeches, and her hips rise from the seat of her improvised high chair with the force of her enthusiasm. The chair wobbles on its narrow legs, and her mother rests a steadying hand on the back.

"There's Daddy," Liese says. "And he's brought our visitor."

Anni bangs her spoon on the edge of her tray, a reveler giddy with the pleasures of the feast.

_Could you do it, Judge? Could you execute her parents at the kitchen table that they opened to you in an act of mercy and then put one in her head while she celebrates your arrival because she thinks you're a new friend?_

He blinks at the baby, but it's Anderson he sees, bent over that trembling kid in the Peachtrees control room, hand fisted in the fabric of his shirt as he mewled and cowered and cringed from the judgment he expected. Anderson, dark eyes serene and voice steady as she pronounced him free to go and watched him scamper into the darkness, a spooked rabbit granted reprieve from the talons of the hawk.

_You let him go, and you're an automatic fail._

_I already failed when I lost my gun. Besides, he's a victim like everybody else. You said the decision was mine, and I made it, and if that's not good enough, then I guess I'm not cut out to be a Judge._ Unwavering certainty in her gaze and the steel of conviction in her voice.

_And for the first time in too damn long, you felt a flicker of hope,_ Hershey says, _thought maybe you weren't fighting a war lost a long time ago._

_Could you do it, Judge?_ Anderson presses, implacable and earnest. _Could you execute two people just for being in love and having a baby? Could you punish the baby for the crimes of her parents, kill her just because she exists?_

Anni grizzles cheerily at him and waggles her bare feet. "Geeet!"

_He's an abomination,_ he protests, but it's a feeble charge when the purported affront to God's order ruffles the baby's hair with absent fondness and ambles to his chair, idly scratching the pale strip of flesh above the waistband of his low-slung jeans. "That num-num isn't going to eat itself, Anni."

"Num!" Anni crows, and plunges her spoon into the oatmeal with the zeal of holy purpose.

_Is she?_ Anderson prods. _Can you honestly say she deserves to die?_

"Penny for your thoughts, Dredd? You look a bit lost." Liese offers him a tentative smile over the rim of her steaming mug.

_There's nothing in these thoughts you want,_ he thinks bleakly. From the corner of his eye, he sees Anni abandon her spoon in favor of her fingers. "I'm just weaker than I thought."

"Mmm. That's to be expected. You were hours away from the end when you came to us. A decent breakfast should help."

A pallid hand sets a cup of coffee in front of him. "There we are, master's guest," says a high, whining voice. "Coffee, nice and black, Yes, yes, and soon, there will be so many nice things." The dead-leaf rustle of chafing palms.

When he turns his head and raises his eyes, he finds himself gazing into a pair of clouded eyes the color of churned peat set inside a cadaverous face white as bleached flour. A black-lipped mouth opens to reveal even blacker teeth and gums. The creature performs a hobbling, obsequious jig, and its hairless head bobs, a grub pulsing in wet, black earth after a spring rain.

"That's the familiar," Johannes supplies as he snatches a rind of bacon from Liese's plate.

He stares at in in morbid fascination as it shuffles backward and turns on its heel, grateful for his Judge's stoicism as he watches it scuttle into the kitchen proper like a dung beetle burrowing into the earth. "Does it have a name?"

Johannes shrugs. "I suppose it must. It was a man once. I've never learned it." He crunches into the bacon with a hum of relish.

_He eats. And likes it, apparently._ "Isn't that a bit well-done for you?"

Johannes raises an eyebrow. "What, you were expecting a live pig, buttered and squealing?" he asks wryly.

"I just thought you preferred a more alternative diet."

He grunts. "Not too sick to be a smartass, I see. However, if that's an offer you're making, I'll be glad to take you up on it." He grins, wide and predatory, and the points of his fangs are long and sharp in the candlelight. In her makeshift high chair, Anni stills, a fistful of oatmeal halfway to her mouth and oozing between her fingers.

Liese rests a hand on his forearm. "Not at the table, love. It'll get Anni going, and she's liable to flip herself ass over teakettle in all the excitement."

Johannes chortles. "'Ass over teakettle', I like that one. I love it when you curse. I'll debauch you yet." He pops the remainder of the bacon strip into his mouth and captures her hand with his own.

"I think that task has been well and truly accomplished," she replies languidly, and squeezes his hand. 

"Oh, but I don't want the fun to be over." He feigns a sulky pout.

"Who said it had to be?" she points out. With that inventive mind of yours, I'm sure you could find a thousand new ways to keep me that way."

"Mmm. I'm going to have so much fun trying," he growls, and lunges for her neck, and for one paralyzed moment, Dredd is sure he's going to sink his fangs into her jugular and cover the table in a fine, crimson mist, but he only nuzzles and nibbles. Liese giggles and makes as though to push him away, but there's no force behind the press of her palm against his cheek, and it isn't long before she's turning in for a kiss.

Anni, swept up in the giddy joy of the moment, shrieks and waves her fists, and clots of oatmeal spatter the table like wedding rice.

_Or brain matter,_ the grim voice of bitter experience amends.

Dredd watches in silence. His mind screams that Johannes is a vampire, Christ's image perverted by unholy acts wrought deep within the bowels of the earth. Duty dictates that he should kill him without hesitation and by any means necessary and then turn his righteous wrath on Liese and the fruit of their godless union, should strike until his strength fails or they bring him down under a savage counterattack, but he looks like nothing so much as a husband warm and safe in the embrace of his family, untroubled and untroubling and interested only in the peaceable pursuit of happiness.

The infantile din masks the shuffling, scraping return of the familiar, who arrives bearing a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of coffee, which it sets in front of him with a jerky flourish. "For the sir," it says, and gestures to the bowl with one flabby, arachnid hand. "And this is just the beginning. I have more, so much more." It rocks back on its scrawny heels and grins at him, hopeful and idiotic.

"You're talkative today," Johannes notes, and circles the rim of his mug with the tip of his index finger. "Perhaps you need more to do."

The familiar quails and shakes its head. "No, master, no. I'm just trying to make our guest feel more at home." The grin widens, becomes ingratiating, and those dull eyes roll in their pasty sockets.

Johannes curls his fingers around the handle of his mug. "He's my guest, and if you want to make him feel at home, you'll stop moving the air with your rotting gums and see to the rest of his breakfast." He raises the mug to his lips but does not partake. "Unless you're telling me that's all there is. If so, we might have a far bigger problem." He raises an eyebrow, and the mug hovers before slightly-parted lips.

The familiar cringes. "Of course not, master, no!" it snivels, and tucks its smooth head betwixt bony shoulders. "As I said, there is so much more." It wrings its hands in a restless, peristaltic twist Dredd finds oddly mesmerizing.

"Then bring it. I won't ask again." No more than a silky murmur, but he senses the steel behind it, and so does the familiar because its eyes widen and it bobbles precariously on its flat heels.

"Yes, master, yes. Right away, yes, yes." It performs a graceless, convulsive bow, a marionette in the hands of an indifferent puppeteer, and scissors its way back to the kitchen.

Johannes watches its retreat without expression. He finally allows himself a sip from his mug, and Dredd watches its progression down his lightly-stubbled throat.

_Less lusting, more eating,_ his famished stomach implores him, and that brings him up short.

_I'm not lusting,_ he sputters. _I'm observing and assessing my situation._

In the back of his mind, Hershey only smiles, sly and knowing.

Defense of his honor duly lodged with his mischievous subconscious, he takes his stomach's sound advice and falls upon the contents of the bowl. It's the same porridge as last night, but it's ambrosial as far as he's concerned, and he can't help a guttural hum of pleasure as he shovels the first hot spoonful into his mouth.

Anni screeches in sticky-faced camaraderie, doubtless thrilled to have found another hot oatmeal enthusiast in the ranks, and avails herself of another fistful.

"There's plenty, so don't stint," Liese says. "Sugar or cream for your coffee? More honey for your oatmeal?"

To speak would mean he'd have to stop eating, and so he merely shakes his head. The second spoonful is as good as the first, perhaps better, and he rolls it on his tongue. It's hot and sweet, honey and brown sugar and a surprising hint of cream. 

Johannes murmurs something to Liese, but it's inconsequential. All that matters is the food, and he gobbles it down as fast as he can move his arm from bowl to mouth, heedless of the intermittent, nettling cries of protest from his tongue and the undignified bulge of his cheeks as he fills his mouth past capacity. The voice of his of-insulted dignity hisses that he should slow down, should sit back and square his shoulders and chew his food before he chokes on it and goes to the eternity he has so narrowly escaped, but it's shouting into the whirlwind, and the only thing that can induce him to stem the relentless flow of sweetened oats is a sip of coffee, bitter and black and nigh-scalding.

He's halfway through the bowl when the familiar returns with the rest of his breakfast, and he nearly whines at the sight of it. Sausage and bacon and two eggs sunny-side up. A slice of country ham and three slices of toast. A small plate of sliced pears and strawberries. It's more food than he's seen since he left the city, and he wonders if it isn't a mirage. Maybe it's nothing but so much formless gruel artfully arranged on a plate, and his starving brain is seeing what it wants to see. How else to explain the fruits of Eden in such a desolate and barren place?

_There's always witchcraft,_ suggests a furtive voice inside his head, a skulking paranoiac peering from the dim recesses of his airless bunker, crouching and black-nailed and tugging fretfully on the fraying strands of his designer rope belt. 

He pushes the thought aside. Badge or not, he's still a Judge, and he'll eat his Lawgiver before he succumbs to such gibbering hysteria.

_What's so crazy about it?_ the paranoiac demands, and his grungy, rubber-sandaled feet scuff and scrape on the gritty concrete. _If there can be weird-ass vampire hybrids who can walk around in the daylight and eat people food as well as people, why not a fucking witch?_ He rises into a half-crouch, arms outthrust as though to enter a collar-and-elbow tie-up, and dark eyes blaze with madness inside his grimy face. _Hey, yeah,_ he says, warming to his theory, _what if she's the witch?_ He jabs an accusatory finger at Liese, who, blissfully unaware, sips from her mug and takes an unhurried bite of toast slathered with raspberry jam. _They say that vampires have concubines and stuff, so maybe she's one of them. Or maybe she's a different kind of familiar, one used for fuckin'._ His opinionated companion licks dry, white-flecked lips, and his hips churn and piston in an uncoordinated, copulatory shimmy that's almost enough to put him off his feed.

He's not sure who "they" are, or if they've said any such things about the fornication habits of vampire hybrids midwifed into the world in the dark, reeking warrens of a hive, but he considers the possibility as he sinks his teeth into a buttery slice of toast. That they have joined flesh is beyond doubt; the fruit of that union is currently double-fisting oatmeal in her high chair and eyeing him with chummy curiosity, but there is nothing of the concubine about Liese--no short skirts or cheap lingerie or the cloying stink of cheap perfume that reeks of alcohol and formaldehyde and stale funeral home flowers, no invitation in her eyes or promissory sway in her hips. There's no soft-bellied submission born of the need for survival and safety when she looks at Johannes, the flat-eared, wary slink of a cat as it wends between a mercurial master's legs, braced for a sudden kick. She's unguarded and content as she bursts the yolk of her egg with the edge of her toast, the lady of the manor without a care in the world.

He thinks of all the high-end bordellos and piss-soaked flophouses he's busted and cleared over the years, with their filthy mattresses crawling with lice and hard-eyed women and girls dressed in synthetic silk and tatty laces and lipstick smudged and cracked at the edges. The tart, animal stink of sweat and unwashed linens and skin-warmed foundation. The baser, moss-and-copper scent of come and latex and lube. The dingy rooms with their bare bulbs mounted in their dusty, rust-speckled fixtures like a lidless, leering eye and their spavined beds sagging in the corner like an overburdened pack mule and the scarves draped over dirty lampshades in a sad attempt at seductive ambiance.

_Not a concubine,_ he thinks as Johannes wipes a smear of egg from the corner of her mouth with the ball of his thumb and brings it to his own lips with the solemnity of a sacrament. _Even the most generous sugar daddy in the world doesn't treat his toy like that, and if she gets knocked up as a result of their liaison, he sure as hell doesn't claim the issue as his with a shout and a smile._

He thinks of the pimps, all lifeless, bovine eyes and broad-knuckled fingers callused and hardened on the faces of their girls, and of the girls he herded into wagons for the trip to the precinct and central booking. Most of them were back at work the minute they were sprung from the isocubes, and he'd seen far too many sprawled in the squalor of a back alley or on a secondhand exam table in some sweltering storage unit where some unlicensed doctor had set up shop with an array of specula and thin needles and jars of homebrew abortifacients.

No, not a concubine, he thinks again as he dips his toast into his egg in an unconscious imitation of Liese. Wife is what Johannes had called her, and he suspects that's closest to the truth of it, though he doubts the Church would recognize their union.

_I don't think they give a rat's ass what the Church recognizes,_ Hershey notes drily, and swings from side to side in her office chair with hypnotic, dreamy regularity. _It's a fact of life whether the Church likes it or not. Life's funny that way, or haven't you noticed?_

He grunts in acknowledgment and washes down his bite of eggy bread with a sip of coffee, and oh, isn't that a treat? It's real coffee, not the instant swill served at the precinct or the hideous brew made from tumbleweed and thistle in the filthy inns and taverns of the dying outposts. His eyelids flutter at the pleasure of it, and he hears a soft huff of amusement from across the table. Liese, he guesses, though when he opens his eyes, it's Johannes who's eyeing him, elbows propped on the table and egg yolk dripping from the tines of his fork onto his plate.

"The first time I had real coffee, it was a revelation," he offers, and drives his tines into the deflated yolk. "It was deemed an extravagance by the Church, so we were allowed only instant. There's a world of such wonders out there, brother."

Dredd eyes him in wary silence as he mainlines his coffee. Experience whispers that there's more to this conversational gambit than meets the eye, but he's too exhausted to sift through words even so simple as these to ferret it out.

"Johannes, hold the sermon until he's lucid enough to give a fig for it, love. Else it's just wasted air," Liese chides him, but a smile curls in the corner of her mouth, the patiently-flicking tail of a cat watching the futile, furtive flight of its unsuspecting quarry.

_Save your sermon,_ he wants to say, but it seems impolitic when he's eating their food at their table, and so he settles for a noncommittal grunt and takes refuge in a bite of egg.

"I wasn't sermonizing," Johannes protests, and settles into a peevish silence.

_Something tells me I'm disrupting the family atmosphere._ He watches Liese press a consolatory kiss to Johannes' temple.

"He's right, though," she says, and scoops yolk onto the edge of her toast, which she devours with relish. "I was just short of starving when we found each other again. I spent the first few weeks eating, and there were foods I hadn't seen since-" She falls silent, and her gaze turns inward, and even through the haze of his fatigue, he knows that she's long ago and far away. "-since I was a little girl," she finishes with brittle pragmatism, and Johannes strokes her forearm in wordless sympathy. "The first time I had a cut of country ham, I almost cried."

Dredd studies her as he eats. There's nothing of the witch about her, no subtle intimation of witches' sabbats held in the light of the moon, of arms held aloft as she spins and writhes and offers her body to a dark and ancient lord, who waits, eyeless and eldritch and ever-grasping beneath the flinty earth. She could be a stumpwater witch, he supposes, but he sees no sign of gris-gris dust or homespun sigils carved into the walls and floors, no bangles on her wrists to ward off evil or charms hung around her neck to invoke the favor and protection of gods older than the tongue of man. There is the cross of ordination on her forehead that once marked her as a servant of God, but he suspects that's an unwanted, indelible relic of the life she left behind.

Another helpless hum of satisfaction as sinks his teeth into a bite of ham. The fatty, salty savoriness fills him with a narcotized bliss, and he sags in his chair. Real food, not shoddily-dressed rats or coyote jerky filamented with strands of coarse fur or lizards fried to a blackened chair in ancient oil gone black with age and flecked with gnats that rise to the surface and bubble and remind him of the floaters they pull from the bilge-choked bay with numbing frequency.

"Now you see why it's one of her favorites," Johannes says, and grins, and if he weren't an abomination and an apostate, it would be convivial, almost inviting.

But it's forbidden to fraternize with those in need of judgment, and so he simply cuts and chews and cuts and chews and cuts and chews until the slice is gone, and his only contribution to the sporadic conversation is the desultory, utilitarian tinkle of cutlery on ceramic. Liese, to her credit, and his guilty relief, bears no grudge for his inhospitable silence, and when he casts longing glances at her ham, she signals the familiar for another.

They finish long before he does, but they're content to leave him to his own devices as they go about their daily domestic rounds. The baby is a cheerful companion as he plows through his oatmeal and keeps up a steady stream of musical gibberish that he finds soothing. Now and then, he looks up to find her watching him with bright curiosity, oatmeal-slimed hand crammed into her mouth as she gums thoughtfully on her knuckles.

_Those aren't nans,_ he thinks with a wry amusement that does not reach the stony impassivity of his face,and is surprised at such a dewy-eyed thought that has its roots in neither law nor justice.

_Just another side effect of delirium,_ he tells himself as he drains the last of his coffee. _It'll pass._

Anni is not so pessimistic, and she chatters incomprehensibly at him and rocks in her chair, an infant Artemis astride her first steed.

"You're so excited today," Liese remarks as she wipes down the table with brisk efficiency. "It's her first visitor," she explains as she stretches to swipe a long crumb at the edge of her reach. "We don't get much company out here."

_Isolated, then._ He files that nugget away for future use.

"And we like it that way." Johannes scoops Anni from her high chair and holds her in the crook of his arm, where she promptly pats his cheek with an oaty hand. "Thank you, my little imp," he says drily, and sighs.

"Hey, I've heard tell that some people pay big credits for the same treatment. "They say it moisturizes."

"I don't moisturize," he mutters.

"Nothing wrong with it. I think it could be fun, to have a spa night."

Johannes raises an eyebrow. "Oh?" 

"I always thought it might be nice to feel glamorous for once."

Indignation flashes in his eyes, but then his face softens, and he draws closer. He reaches out to caress the smooth plane of her back as she leans over the table. Naked devotion flickers in his eyes as his fingers skim over the thin, simple fabric of her cassock, and Dredd is surprised by the unwavering depth of it. He's seldom seen its like in the city, with its filth and apathy and wanton, random cruelty, and in truth, he has always considered it a myth, a morsel of hope the human heart dangles before itself in order to go on beating. Yet here it stands, in all its mundane splendor, in the last place he expected to find it, a rose rising from the desert sand with dew upon its delicate pedals.

Johannes withdraws his hand. "Speaking of spa treatments, it's time to give this one her bath. You coming?"

"And miss my chance to combine it with my shower? Just let me get this one sorted." She nods in his direction.

"Sorted?" Dredd echoes warily, and he suddenly feels very exposed in nothing but a flimsy shirt and jeans.

She rolls her eyes. "Are all Judges so suspicious?" She straightens. towel wadded in one hand.

"The ones who live."

"Fair enough," she concedes. "But you can give it a rest. We're not demons. If we wanted to kill you or torture you, we wouldn't be fattening you up on our food."

"Though you'd probably taste better if we did," Johannes muses.

That earns him a sharp jab in the ribs. "Enough, you." To Dredd, she says, "I mean it. You were so much jerky when he brought you in. He could've feasted on you for months if he were careful, but he didn't, and he won't. All I meant by sorted was getting you someplace cozy where you can rest. Do you want to go back to your room, or would you like to lie on the couch for a while? I can have the familiar stoke the fire if you like."

While the meal has fortified him, he doubts the surge of energy will last, and he's loath to squander it on a return trip down the hall. Better to spend it on recon and formulating a plan about where to go once he's sure he won't drop twenty feet out the door. Besides, the prospect of lying in that cramped room surrounded by the remnants of God knows how many lives holds no appeal.

"The couch. Please."

"Courtesy at last," she replies drily. "Couch it is." She absently folds the towel only to let it unfurl again. "Just let me get your pillows and blankets."

"Come see us when you're finished," Johannes says. "Something tells me I'll need the extra hands." He gives her temple a peck.

"An octopus would need extra hands where she's concerned," Liese agrees. "And I believe I've already RSVPed to that party."

"The smash of the social season." He swings the baby in a high, graceful whirl in imitation of a sweeping waltz, and she shrieks with delight until they're out of sight.

There's nothing for Dredd to do but wait, and it isn't long before Liese's fashioned an inviting nest for him on the couch, and he can feel his body wilting at the prospect of curling up beneath the mound of afghans and linens. He shuffles forward with an eagerness hardly befitting his calling and settles onto the couch. The blankets smell of dust and cedar and a faint whiff of mothballs, but they're warm and impossibly soft, lived-in proofs of a life lived beyond the severe strictures of the law, and he nestles into their depths with a helpless sigh.

"Well, don't you look snug as a bug in a rug?" Liese says as she smooths the blanket over him with maternal fussiness. "Good. I've got to help with the little one, but I'll wake you for lunch. It's usually light--sandwiches, some fruit."

"That will be fine," he says, as though there would be recourse if it weren't. His eyelids droop, and he can feel his body uncoiling, slipping beyond the reach of his dry skin and leaden limbs and prickling tongue. He's safe here. There are no wolves at the door, no shadows with foul mouths and blood-smeared blades and the smell of cordite clinging to their skin like musk. Just the lumpen softness of the couch and distant splash of water into an old clawfoot tub.

_Oasis,_ he thinks, and sleep pulls him under long before the familiar creeps in to tend the fire in the tiny hearth.


	6. Once Upon a Time in Wonderland

He drifts on a fathomless tide, but dimly aware of the world around him. Every now and then, something penetrates the agreeable fog-a snatch of conversation, low and indistinct and pleasant as the warmth of a winter hearth; the cocooning rasp of his blankets; the sussurating scrape of fabric against rough-hewn wooden planks; the muffled, meaty thump of bare feet across the floor, the triumphant, wobbling totter of an exultant drunk. Once, he rises to brief consciousness to find a plump, pink finger prodding his nostril and a pair of golden eyes blinking at him in chummy bonhomie, but before he can rouse himself or recoil from the intruding digit, a pair of chivvying hands and a sibilant, coaxing voice shepherds his small visitor away. It's easier to return to the sweet oblivion of sleep, and so he does with a grateful sigh.

Another glimpse of the world beyond his blissful unawareness. His doppelganger sits on the floor, cross-legged and bare-chested in front of the fire. His arms are full of wriggling, chirping daughter, and he laughs softly as she squirms and grunts and does her best to climb over his arms.

"In such a hurry to explore your territory today," he says, and gently pulls her back onto his lap. "Don't you want to sit with your papa? Mmm?" He drops a kiss into the dark down of her hair.

"Gzzt!" she declares with the steely resolve of an empress determined upon her path, but then she sits back and gazes up at her father, finger jammed into her mouth. He idly wonders if it's the same one that was intent on conducting a thorough investigation of his nasal passage. "Vat?" she muses.

Her father beams, white fangs delicate and perversely lovely in the flickering firelight. "That's right! I'm your vati, and I love you."

She grins at his pronouncement of paternal devotion, and then she exchanges her finger for her thumb and turns into the protective lee of his body with the unthinking, effortless dexterity of the newly-made. "Vat," she repeats solemnly around the stopper of her thumb.

"Yes," Johannes affirms, and begins to rock back and forth with dreamy fluidity.

_Not a monster,_ Dredd reports to Church fathers left far behind in the grey, dingy sanctuary of their sainted city. _Just a father loving his child._

_Even Satan was fair to look upon,_ Monsignor Orelas intones, thin, colorless lips flecked white with dry spittle that lodges in the corners like stray breadcrumbs. _That "father" is an abomination and an affront to the will of God, and you should not be tempted by misguided pity. When you are strong enough, you must strike, and hard, with the full might and righteousness of the Lord!_ Orelas commands, but Dredd suspects it isn't the Lord who moves his tongue. It's a blasphemous thought, one he would neither have ventured nor entertained when he was a Judge with the city at his command and a Lawgiver clapped to his hip.

_You are still a Judge,_ he admonishes himself. _Until you return to the from whence you were formed and there is no memory of you save in the Annals of Justice. You must bring law unto the lawless with neither bias nor pity._

_But not yet._

As though he's caught the drift of his unspoken thoughts, Johannes raises his head from Anni's crown and stares at him. His gaze is watchful, leonine and golden and assessing, and his arms tighten around his daughter. His upper lip twitches with the impulse to bare his fangs in warning.

_I'm not going to hurt you,_ he wants to say, but he's not sure of the truth of it, and a lie is a sin, and so he lets his eyes drift closed and returns to the depths of healing sleep.

A third awakening, and Johannes and the baby still sit before the fire, though the latter has abdicated the cozy confines of his lap in favor of a cheerful toddle around the room. She pauses in her wobbling perambulation to stoop and pick up a squashy, orange block and hold it aloft like a holy relic reclaimed, and then she stuff its corner into her mouth and resumes her unsteady circuit. Liese has joined the happy domestic tableau, and she has supplanted the baby on Johannes' lap. She surmounts him in a loose-limbed straddle, and her hands cradle his face, thumbs tracing the sharp contours of his cheeks.

"-worry too much, my love," she's saying, and she presses her forehead to Johannes' and nuzzles his face.

He hums at the contact and tightens his embrace. "I have my reasons," he points out. We both do."

"Yes," she agrees, melancholy now, and her eyes darken.

"I don't scold. But how do you know we can trust him?"

A shrug, little more than a ripple of shoulder. "I don't," she admits, and a dim recess of Dredd's mind applauds her candor. "But I won't be like the Church. I won't kill on a maybe, a grim supposition." She shifts, sits back to meet his gaze. "I'm not afraid. I might be rusty, but I haven't forgotten my training. Besides, you'll be here to protect us." She leans in for a kiss.

He obliges, but he won't be turned from his subject. "I can't be here all the time. I need to hunt."

"There's the familiar."

A contemptuous snort. "If you're depending on the courage of that spineless waste of skin, you'll be sorely disappointed and probably left in a heap of bloody rags and gross incompetence."

"You should be kinder," she chides. "He's the only reason we still have Anni."

There's a long silence, broken only by the baby's industrious burbling, and her parents turn their heads to watch her waddle past. "I know. But kindness is a luxury I can't afford."

"If we die, I know you'll avenge us." She grins and nuzzles the side of his neck.

He draws away from her, eyes wide and stricken. "It's not a joke, Liese. If I lose you and Anni, then I have lost everything." It's so plaintive that Anni stops and stares at him, diapered ass wobbling as she fights to hold on to her tenuous mastery of gravity.

Liese sits back, ass on his knees, brow furrowed in confusion. "Johannes, what's wrong? You've been acting funny for days, and since he's been here, you've gone paranoid. Do you know something I don't?" 

"No," he replies, but when she eyes him in dubious silence, he adds, "He's a Judge. How do we know he won't nurse himself on our kindness and return the favor by telling his friends where to find us?"

"Do you really think he will?"

He glances at him, and Dredd prays he doesn't notice he's awake beneath his pile of blankets. If he does, then the next words will never be said, and he might die before he can throw off the covers.

Johannes sighs. "I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not."

"Are you willing to kill a man _you_ brought into on home because of maybe?"

He returns his gaze to her face, and the love in his eyes is naked and all-consuming. "I would kill anything that threatened you or my little imp on the strength of possibly," he says flatly, and the stony conviction in it chills him.

_Truths spoken with the tongues of fallen angels,_ he thinks.

"If that's what you truly believe, then kill him," comes the equally cold reply, and in it, he can hear the echo of the warrior she must once have been. "But if that's the choice you've made, then someone should take Anni away until it's done. She's too young to be glimpsing monsters."

A sharp intake of breath from Johannes, and his face crumples, bruised and impossibly young. "Is that what you think I am, my Liese? A monster?"

She leans forward and presses her forehead to his. "No, no, no," she reassures him. "You are as you have always been, the husband of my heart. But I know what the world can make of you if you let it, what it has already made of us. Don't feed the darkness. Don't become what they think you."

Johannes closes his eyes and buries his face in her neck. "I can't lose you."

"You won't. She pulls him closer, becomes the watchful protector he had been to Anni not so long ago. "Are you sure that's all that's bothering you?" She rubs between his shoulderblades in a soothing circle.

"Yes," he says softly, the reply all but lost to the sudden crackle and pop of the fire behind them, but Dredd hears the hesitation in it, the conscious falsity.

So does Liese if the furrowed brow and fleeting hitch in the smooth motion of her hand are any indications, but she does not press. She merely drops her chin to his crown and its bounty of brown hair and begins to hum a tune whose notes are unknown to him but that pull them far beyond the looming taint of his presence, and he falls asleep to the soft murmur of Johannes' endearments whispered against her flesh.

It's a gentle tug that wakes him the fourth time, and as he blinks the sleep and grit from his eyes, he thinks it's the baby, come for another investigation of the interloper who wears her father's face, but when he raises his head and peers blearily down the length of the couch, it's Liese he sees, though Anni is hitched against her hip.

"There you are, Judge. Lunch is ready if you want it."

"More for us if you don't," Johannes calls jauntily from the table.

Dredd props himself on his elbows and rolls his shoulders to dispel the tension there. "Yeah. Just let me take care of something first." He tosses back the blankets and sits up, and shit, is that his spine crackling like that? He stretches and wonders just when the hell he got so old, forty going on sixty. He scrubs his face with his hands and winces at the sandpapery rasp of his skin and the prickle of his stubble, and then he heaves himself upright and sways for a moment.

Liese steps forward, hand outstretched. "Do you need help?"

"I got it," he grunts. "Besides, you've got your hands full." He nods at the baby.

"She is that," Liese agrees, and gives her a joyful bounce.

Anni grizzles happily.

"If you're sure," Liese says. "You know where it is. Call if you need help." She surveys him a moment longer, and when he doesn't wilt in an indecorous tangle of limbs and upraised ass, she smiles and whisks her daughter to the table, which is just out of sight.

The shuffling trip to the bathroom goes far better than he expected it would, and it stretches his sleep-sore muscles so that his gait feels almost normal by the time he returns to the living room, though his legs are still heavier than they should be, and his head is still muddled and slow and filled with cotton batting.

_'Least my piss no longer looks like cough syrup,_ he thinks as his feet scrape a path to the table. The family has already set to its meal, but there's a chair and a plate waiting for him, and when he sits, he finds it laden with a salami, smoked turkey, and Swiss cheese sandwich on rye topped with tomato, red onion, and spicy mustard. There are also a handful of small sweet pickles, red and black grapes, and two wedges of cheese. One is cheddar, by the looks of it, but there begins and ends his knowledge of cheese, and the other is a mystery, one he wastes little energy in contemplating. It's enough that it plays a part in filling the bottomless void of his stomach.

He ignores it for the time being and sets to his sandwich with a will. Lunch is a luxury seldom afforded to a Judge, seated as they usually are on the thrumming saddle of their Lawmaster as they weave through the smog-choked city streets. More often than not, his lunch, if it came at all, was a cup of bitter, gritty coffee at the precinct and a nutrient pack shoved under his tongue as he swung his leg over his Lawmaster. On his rare day off, it was often foregone in favor of sleep, or a quick hash plate at the nearest greasy spoon, wolfed down as he hunched in his booth, eyes searching the faces of the other customers for an abrupt end to his personal time. A sandwich was a lost art from another time, and certainly not meant for him.

There's little conversation, which suits him fine, but he wonders how much of their silence is a byproduct of his presence, a fly in their familial ointment. Would they be so quiet if he weren't here, or would there be laughter and chatter and the amiable scrape and shuffle of shifting chairs and feet? For all their monastic silence as they chew and swallow and pluck the occasional grape from its stem, there's no shortage of touch. The skim of fingers as Johannes and Liese share a plate; the brush of her hand over his shoulder as she sips her water; the absent affection with which Johannes brushes stray golden strands from her cheek; Johannes' socked foot planted on the crossbar between the legs of Anni's high chair to keep her from toppling herself in her uncoordinated eagerness to celebrate the joys of the day; the gentle nudge of his fingers as he pushes one of her tiny bowls closer. Touch and touch and touch, and none of it fraught with the lurid weight of future expectation.

"If you put as much energy into eating as you do into trying to upend yourself, you'd be eight feet tall," Johannes observes as the wooden dowel creaks beneath his anchoring foot.

"Or be four hundred pounds and impossible for me to lift," Liese offers, and takes a hearty bite of sandwich.

Johannes shakes his head. "I think her metabolism runs too hot for that."

Anni grins gummily at them and dips her hand into the nearest bowl. It emerges with what looks alarmingly like a tapeworm, but then Dredd realizes it's a noodle wet with an unknown broth.

"Is that why you're so fit? And here I thought it was because of all the walking you do."

Johannes grins at her in the candlelight. "Who says it's not both? I do work hard to provide." He helps himself to a wedge of the unknown cheese and pops it into his mouth with dreamy, Sunday-morning relish.

Liese makes no reply, but her hand strokes his nape with the affection of long habit, and Johannes closes his eyes and purrs, a tom lying stretched and boneless in the cradling, dusty warmth of the sun.

Anni takes a bite of her noodle and offers the rest to her father with an inquisitive cheep.

Johannes cracks a golden eye. "For me?"

Anni extends her arm with a grunt.

Dredd expects him to refuse the taste-tested gift, but he plucks it from her fingers with graceful deftness. "Thank you." He pops it into his mouth and gives it a contemplative chew. "Oh, it's your fishy broth. No wonder you want to share." 

"It's one of her favorites," Liese explains.

"I don't blame her," Johannes puts in. "That stuff's quite fine. I hope the familiar has made enough for later."

"Yes, master, yes," the familiar warbles from the kitchen, as though it had been listening. "There's plenty, plenty. Enough for two days. Then the fish will sour."

"Children don't usually like to share their favorites," Dredd says, and shifts a bit of onion from between his molars with the point of his tongue.

"Anni isn't most children," Johannes replies, and Dredd's not sure if it's more paternal pride or a warning, and so he retreats to the safety of another bite of sandwich.

As though to prove her father's point, Anni offers him a noodle.

"No. Thank you."

"J't," Anni insists, and jabs it at him. The noodle flaps disconsolately, the standard of a fallen kingdom offered to a faithful vassal.

"He said no, Anni. We don't force people to take things," Liese says.

_Hardly the advice one would give the future Antichrist,_ Dredd muses wryly as Anni looks from him to her mother, the noodle hovering limply between them.

_Satan comes arrayed in beauty and splendor. You must not be so easily swayed, my son,_ Orelas rebukes him.

Anni clearly disagrees with her mother's philosophy on giving because her small brow darkens, grows thunderous. She looks so much like a disapproving Law matron that he'd laugh if it weren't so unwise. She mutters under her breath in the indecipherable language of Baby and slurps the rejected offering into her mouth.

"I know, my girl," Liese clucks sympathetically. "But people are allowed to not want things, even if you have the best intentions."

Another skeptical grunt from Anni, and she plunges her hand into her bowl and fishes out another noodle, which she thrusts at her heretical mother, determined that her largesse find suitable gratitude.

Liese accepts the proffered morsel. "That's very nice. Thank you." She pops the noodle into her mouth with a flourish.

Mollified, Anni resumes her meal with lusty satisfaction.

"I don't want to discourage her charitable impulses," Liese says, and wipes her fingers on her napkin. "It's not like she has much chance to practice. Any, if you don't count us."

"You shouldn't," Johannes opines. "Kindness is a trap. The world will give her nothing if it can help it. She must be strong enough to take it."

It's a miserable philosophy, the ugly aftermath of which he's seen far too often in his years on the streets, in the blood and smoke and twisted bodies and the ravaged survivors left to pick up the sharp and suddenly-unappealing pieces of their lives, and yet, in the hard, bitter, unglamorous recesses of his heart, he cannot disagree. He's seen far too many eager rookies with hearts in the right place and hands in the wrong one end up on the casualty and lost-assets lists, so much mangled fodder for the recyc units before they've finished the assessment for which they'd trained with such idealistic enthusiasm. He's seen just as many seasoned veterans lost to a moment of hesitation, fatally distracted by a twinge of compassion for the undeserving.

"Is that what I was, a weakness?" Liese counters. "A trap into which you were so helplessly lured?"

"Always. From the moment I first saw you." He reaches for the hand at his nape and brings it over his head to kiss the knuckles. "And I have never been so happy to be ensnared."

A faint blush creeps into her cheeks, but her reply is a prosaic, "Maybe she'll be a nurse one day, or why not a doctor?" 

He's not sure there's a place for either out here in the forgotten wastes of the world, where nothing endures but the years, but he is sure that there's no good in bursting a mother's dreamy bubble for her child, and so he nods and pops a small sweet pickle into his mouth.

"Aren't they fabulous? Johannes made them himself. I prefer garlic dills, but they're more a dinner food, or so says Johannes. I think he just hates the garlic."

"It's not my favorite, no," Johannes says drily. "A little is fine, but you could peel varnish with what you prefer." He wrinkles his nose.

"Philistine," Liese retorts comfortably, and starts on the second half of her sandwich.

It occurs to him as the silence resettles over the table that he's wandered from the stolid, unremarkable path of reality and blundered headlong into some twisted Wonderland, one scorched and unmade in the blinding flash of a nuclear holocaust and remade in the image of After. After the blast-furnace heat that melted flesh from bone that ran like wax and vaporized hair and turned tongues to bubbling goo inside screaming mouths. After the ash that blotted out the sun for months on end and turned the lands of milk and honey to airless voids of sand and cracked earth and bleached bones that crunch underfoot. After the White Rabbit has gone to radioactive dust and left nothing behind but the shadow of his pocket watch, its tarnished gold limpid and malleable as putty. Alice and the Mad Hatter are the only survivors of the whirlwind, and he's sitting at their table, taking tea in the ashes of the world.

_They look sane to me,_ Anderson says. _And besides, who's to say that all of us aren't a little fucking crazy? You'd have to be to live in the world we've got._

He thinks of Ma-Ma, who severed her pimp's dick with her teeth, and who built her illegal empire on a tide of blood and death, and of the citizens of Peachtrees, abandoned by the system in the name of budget cuts and the convenience of picking its battles, most of them easier than the squalid, cramped block of shitholes they called home. They had died by the score, shot and burned and buried beneath the rubble, and when it was over and Ma-Ma had been a greasy smear on the filthy atrium floor, hundreds more had been homeless. Ma-Ma was dead, but so was their med tech, and it wouldn't be long before the next scumbag moved in and set up shop. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, and all they had to show for it was a life that much harder than it had been before the Law cast its cold shadow over them in the name of justice.

_And even if they are, does it really matter? You're alive, and you have a place to go. Stop looking a gift horse in the mouth._

_I'm not sure the Church would see shacking up with an abomination and his family as a gift._

_Yeah, well, the Church tossed you out on your ass for giving me a chance. Do you really give a shit about their judgment?_

It's a blasphemous line of inquiry for which he has no answer, and so he stops his mouth with a wedge of the unknown cheese. It's soft, almost creamy, and infused with a light nuttiness.

"Brie," Johannes offers as he filches another of his wife's pickles over her squawk of protest. "So soft you can spread it."

He's seldom had anything so rich, and his stomach rumbles happily.

_Careful,_ whispers the joyless voice of prudence. _Eat too much of that, and you'll shit until it hurts._

That's advice he can follow, and so he restricts himself to more pickles and the bursting ripeness of the grapes. The conversation ebbs again, but Anni, determined to inject joie de vivre into the rather stolid proceedings, keeps up a steady stream of agreeable gabble silenced only by the occasional bite of noodle.

"That's right," her father says after one particularly voluble outburst, and Dredd wonders if he understands his daughter's animated soliloquies.

Lunch proves as generous as breakfast, and he puts away two sandwiches and far too many pickles by the time he rises from his chair with crumb-covered plate in hand. He's full for the first time in weeks, and his limbs are full of a pleasant lassitude, as though one of the drug pushers in Junkie Corners has slipped a needle past his armor and pushed a dose of cheap smack into his veins. He belches softly and blinks logily at surroundings that suddenly strike him as cozy.

_Don't let your guard down,_ warns the cold, focused voice that has carried him through thousands of judgments and hundreds of raids and fire fights where lead and blood had flown in equal measure and he'd emerged with scarcely a scratch, stepping out of the smoke and dust and over the bodies of his colleagues and the perps they'd brought down and sent to final justice, but it's a hard thought to hold when there's no delirious thrum of adrenaline in his veins or insectile whine of bullets in his ears or the heft of his Lawgiver in his callused palm. This is the longest he's gone without the protective carapace of his body armor, and while he feels exposed and too light, a mollusk torn from its shell, part of him exults in the perverse freedom of it. He stifles the impulse to skim his palm over his bare skin.

Liese flashes him a bemused smile. "You can just leave that there. The familiar will see to it."

He realizes how ridiculous he must look, standing at their table with an empty plate in his hand and staring gormlessly into space. He straightens his shoulders and stiffens his spine, embarrassed. "I can do it. I want to pull my weight around here." People who couldn't pull weight owed debts, and debts are a danger he refuses to abide. 

"A man of courtesy. Been a long time since I've seen one of those." Johannes' golden eyes brighten inside his face, and he points to the kitchen. "It shouldn't be hard to find."

It isn't; he simply follows the tinkle of cutlery and the slosh of water, and he finds himself in a room little bigger than a stationhouse hotbox and crowded with pots and pans and culinary arcana whose uses elude him. Cast-iron skillets dangle from iron hooks in the ceiling and he shoulders his way through them, an intrepid explorer picking his way through the stifling, uncharted jungle.

_Could be a serviceable weapon,_ he thinks as the skillets meet with a sonorous clang that reminds him of the Cathedral bells calling the downtrodden throngs to Mass in its grim shadow, and the familiar looks over its hunched shoulder at the sound, its bloodless arms plunged to the elbows in sudsy water that sloshes in the deep-throated, steel basin of the sink.

It favors him with a black-lipped, simpering smile, but its muddy eyes are hard and wary inside its doughy face, and it watches him with the calculating interest of a crouching alley rat. "Did the master send you?" it quavers. The water in the basin heaves.

He's not sure how to answer that, but the affirmative seems closer to the truth, and so he says, "Yes." He holds up the plate. "Where should I put this?"

The familiar raises a soapy hand, and water drips from the end of one bloated finger that reminds him of the floaters they'd pulled from the bay with monotonous, noisome regularity. "Oh, yes, yes. Sir can just put it there." It flicks the aforementioned finger at a square of scarred butcher-block countertop to his right, and water arcs through the humid air to mist on the wood, the fine spray of holy water sprinkled over the upturned face of the faithful penitent.

_Blasphemous thoughts,_ Monsignor Orelas warns. _You see how quickly the rot of evil spreads._

He sidesteps to the counter, but his eyes scan his surroundings. The large sink dominates the room, a slack gawp that sits beneath a row of drab cabinets with crooked, peeling doors. To its left squats an ancient icebox, relic of a bygone century, white and leprous with rust and possessed of a phlegmatic rattle that bespeaks an imminent demise. And between it and the rise and fall of the familiar's shoulder as its arms hold to their appointed task, a butcher's block from which sprouts a full set of knives.

_Probably the most modern thing in here,_ he muses as the refrigerator gives an asthmatic wheeze and the compressor cycles down with a jarring thump. _And I'm willing to bet they're sharp._

The familiar follows his gaze. Its churning arms slow but don't stop, and its thin, tremulous smile is sly. Gleeful challenge flickers in its knowing gaze. _Go ahead, friend. See how far it gets you. I would dearly love to know._

"Can I assist you, guest of the master?" it asks, and shifts its body to place it between him and the object of his scrutiny.

"No." He sets the plate on the scrap of counter. "There is no power in here, so how does that refrigerator run?" he demands, ever the Judge despite all proofs to the contrary.

The rotten grin widens. "The master has his ways, yes." No rat now, but a slat-sided cur with the scent of wounded prey in its nostrils. Its submerged hands churn and stir in the filmy water, and he can see the gears turning in its head.

To not turn his back would be a sign of weakness and an admission of unease, but he suspects that if he turns his back, the familiar will expand the cutlery's territory by planting one of those well-honed blades in his back and screaming his master to the feast, and so he swallows his pride, oft-battered of late, and backs into what he supposes is the dining room. He holds the familiar's gaze until it turns away, and only when it begins to hum tunelessly to itself does he turn around.

There's no sign of the family, but he hears the distant murmur of voices from down the corridor, as well as a muted thump from what he thinks is his erstwhile sickroom.

_If you're tossing it for loot, you won't get much,_ he thinks bleakly. _Unless you're looking for sand. I don't even know where my gear is._

He shuffles to the homey familiarity of the living room and steps over a cairn of squashy building blocks on his way to the couch. The fire burns low in the hearth, little more than glowing embers behind the brass grate, and the voices from the rear of the house rise and fall, the staticky hum of a stationhouse radio. A sharp, high squeal, Anni, no doubt, followed by a soothing murmur.

_Johannes,_ he thinks, though he can't say why, and settles himself among the cushions. He's just draped the blankets over his legs when a door deep within the dim hallway swings open.

"Okay, let's go," Johannes directs his unseen companion, and there comes the meaty slap of bare feet on wood. Anni, of course, and he wonders if she'll have a banana in her hands when she toddles into view.

But it's food for thought she has when she waddles sedately into the room, a slender book bound in cheap cardboard the seafoam green of the stationhouse toilets. She clutches it in her pudgy hands, its bottom edge digging into the stolid podge of her belly, and she looks for all the world like a street busker ready to peddle her wares on the nearest streetcorner. She pauses at the arm of the couch and gazes at him in silence, cool and assessing. Whatever quality she seeks, she must find him lacking, because she utters a disapproving burr and hitches her prize higher on her tubby belly. A haughty sniff, and she toddles onward.

Johannes, who's brought up the rear, ever the dutiful vassal, chortles. "Sorry, friend. Looks like the honor of storytime has passed you by." He follows in his daughter's dogged train and waits while she plops onto her butt beside her blocks with the suddenness of a felled sparrow and holds out her treasured tome.

"Oh, you want me to have storytime," Johannes says solemnly, and rocks back on his heels.

"Vat!" Anni confirms, and thrusts the book at him.

"Of course she does," Liese says as she emerges from the corridor with a laundry basket beneath one arm and a bolt of black fabric beneath the other. "As far as she's concerned, you're the sage among storytellers." She settles herself on the floor beside the dowager chair and unrolls a length of black cotton.

Johannes grins and accepts the outthrust volume, and then he drops to the floor with loose-limbed grace and crosses his legs. Anni promptly claims his lap, nearly crushing her prized book with her diapered ass in the process.

Johannes rescues it from its crushing cotton snare and tucks the baby against him. He wraps a bracing, restraining arm around her middle and opens the book. "All right, my little imp, who should we visit today?" He slowly thumbs through the thick pages, pausing whenever she shows a flicker or interest.

For her part, Anni gives the matter grave consideration, gnawing thoughtfully on her index finger as her eyes scan the pages of colorful images now faded.

_It's a kids' book,_ Dredd realizes. _Christ knows how old it is. Centuries, it looks like._

"Dat!" Anni declares at last, and jabs a soggy finger at something Dredd can't see.

"Ah, an old favorite." Johannes stretches his spine as though in preparation for a great oration, and then he begins. "In a great oak tree beside the river, there lived a beautiful red bird..."

Liese, bent over her fabric with sewing scissors in her hand, smiles.

The story unfolds, mellifluous and musical on Johannes' practiced tongue, the words worn and familiar and comforting as rosary beads sliding through gun-callused fingers. Dredd watches in dozy fascination as the words rise and fall in exhortation and the recounting of tests and tribulations suitable for tiny ears. He's never been privy to the inner workings of a family whole and healthy and untouched by violence and tragedy. He has always come long after the mortal wound has been inflicted and the light and grace have drained from it along with the blood and tissue and the minute bone fragments that stipple the dusty, greying wallpaper. 

_Eden before the fall,_ he thinks as the cadence lures him toward yet another sojourn into oblivion. _Before the serpent slipped in and ruined everything God had wrought in the matter of a moment._

He tumbles into sleep on the snip of Liese's scissors and the glass-chime merriment of Anni's laughter and the distant thought that Johannes must have carried a whiff of brimstone in his lungs long before he fell for a losing cause and into the clutches of a vampire queen, and when he wakes, it will be to the too-familiar howl of a parting unsought.


End file.
